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拍品专文
In the autumn of 1881 Clausen moved from London out to Childwick Green in Hertfordshire and among the first things he witnessed were fieldworkers gathering bundles of brushwood. November was the normal time in country areas when woods were 'thinned', hedges strengthened, hurdles woven for sheep enclosures, and new brooms were made. Unsuitable saplings and other debris were collected for kindling. It was an activity that involved men, women and children, as his contemporary study, Gossips (c.1881, Bury Art Gallery) reveals, and the present picture may even have been painted to complement Boy and Man (private collection), Clausen's successful Institute of Painters in Watercolours exhibit of the following spring. These pictures formed the nucleus of a group that culminated in 1885 with The End of a Winter's Day (unlocated), a picture of an old, over-laden woodman and boy.
At the time there was much discussion about the work of Jean-François Millet, following the publication of Alfred Sensier's monograph on the artist. It included an illustration of the celebrated drawing of a woodcutter bent under the weight of a huge bundle. Clausen would additionally have known about Alphonse Legros' more recent treatments of the theme illustrating the fable of La Fontaine, Death and the Woodcutter. However at Childwick Green he was less concerned with legend than with presenting the true picture of life in the fields - as he later famously recalled, 'one saw people doing simple things under good conditions of lighting'. He had, in 1880, become aware of the current tendency towards rural naturalism in French painting in the years following the death of Millet and at the Grosvenor Gallery had the opportunity to study the work of Bastien-Lepage in some detail. Although this may have been a contributory factor in his move from Hampstead, he had nevertheless found another mentor. This was the Scots painter, John Robertson Reid, who lived a few streets away and who had shot to fame at the Royal Academy with modern rustic panoramas in 1878 and 1879. In 1880, Reid exhibited a large picture, Mary, the Maid of the Inn (1880, unlocated) at the Grosvenor, a picture that, although based on Robert Southey's Broadside Ballad, was praised for its 'fine and faithful out-of-door tone'. It was this fidelity to nature that clearly impressed Clausen in the group of figures carrying brushwood in the background of the painting.
If in 1881 he was keen to emulate Reid and Bastien-Lepage, it was an ambition that could only be founded on dedicated study. A process that began with fine watercolours such as Gathering Fuel which would be carried forward into oil paint. But this lay in the future and for the present it was a matter of observing the foreshortening of an arm, the angle of a foot or the way a head turns to look across a shoulder bearing the weight of a bundle of sticks. These are things that would matter crucially when in later years he painted full-length shepherdesses, stone pickers and his Chantrey picture The Girl at the Gate (Tate Britain). They were the very things that marked out to the new Naturalism. As he later wrote of Bastien-Lepage, 'All his personages are placed before us in the most satisfying completeness, without the appearance of artifice, but as they live; and without comment as far as is possible on the author's part'.
KMc.
At the time there was much discussion about the work of Jean-François Millet, following the publication of Alfred Sensier's monograph on the artist. It included an illustration of the celebrated drawing of a woodcutter bent under the weight of a huge bundle. Clausen would additionally have known about Alphonse Legros' more recent treatments of the theme illustrating the fable of La Fontaine, Death and the Woodcutter. However at Childwick Green he was less concerned with legend than with presenting the true picture of life in the fields - as he later famously recalled, 'one saw people doing simple things under good conditions of lighting'. He had, in 1880, become aware of the current tendency towards rural naturalism in French painting in the years following the death of Millet and at the Grosvenor Gallery had the opportunity to study the work of Bastien-Lepage in some detail. Although this may have been a contributory factor in his move from Hampstead, he had nevertheless found another mentor. This was the Scots painter, John Robertson Reid, who lived a few streets away and who had shot to fame at the Royal Academy with modern rustic panoramas in 1878 and 1879. In 1880, Reid exhibited a large picture, Mary, the Maid of the Inn (1880, unlocated) at the Grosvenor, a picture that, although based on Robert Southey's Broadside Ballad, was praised for its 'fine and faithful out-of-door tone'. It was this fidelity to nature that clearly impressed Clausen in the group of figures carrying brushwood in the background of the painting.
If in 1881 he was keen to emulate Reid and Bastien-Lepage, it was an ambition that could only be founded on dedicated study. A process that began with fine watercolours such as Gathering Fuel which would be carried forward into oil paint. But this lay in the future and for the present it was a matter of observing the foreshortening of an arm, the angle of a foot or the way a head turns to look across a shoulder bearing the weight of a bundle of sticks. These are things that would matter crucially when in later years he painted full-length shepherdesses, stone pickers and his Chantrey picture The Girl at the Gate (Tate Britain). They were the very things that marked out to the new Naturalism. As he later wrote of Bastien-Lepage, 'All his personages are placed before us in the most satisfying completeness, without the appearance of artifice, but as they live; and without comment as far as is possible on the author's part'.
KMc.