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Lot Essay
Clausen first addressed the subject of mowers in a watercolour of 1885 as a study of two men scything an open field. It was to form the basis of one of his most iconic subjects – The Mowers (Lincolnshire Museums). In the present instance the central motif, a lone mower, seen in back view, is placed in a setting with which the artist was very familiar (see lot 181). Although orchards were sometimes used for grazing, the grass in the present case, is being cut on a bright sunny midsummer day. Blossom has passed and the fruit has not yet formed. The sloping trees on the right may well be those of Orchard Scene (1885-7, Lincolnshire Museums), seen from a slightly different angle while the solitary figure echoes that in Bastien-Lepage’s Les Bles Murs (Guézireh Museum, Cairo).
Drawings of labourers with scythes appear in Clausen’s sketchbooks of the mid-late 1880s and a study showing specific details of a back view is in Bristol City Art Gallery, with a fine watercolour, also a mower in back view, in the Art Gallery of New South Wales. This important body of work which continued intermittently until The Old Reaper (1909, Manchester City Art Gallery) was not without controversy. In 1902 the artist was challenged on the stance of his mowers by a correspondent of The Magazine of Art (p. 297), and in responding declared that he had ‘studied the action very carefully’ (K. McConkey, George Clausen and the Picture of English Rural Life, Glasgow, 2012, p. 105). He even supplied a diagram to demonstrate the position of the feet and the arc of the scythe’s swing. In the present case, the end of the stroke is shown and the blade of the implement can clearly be seen emerging from the grass at the mower’s left heel.
KMc.
Drawings of labourers with scythes appear in Clausen’s sketchbooks of the mid-late 1880s and a study showing specific details of a back view is in Bristol City Art Gallery, with a fine watercolour, also a mower in back view, in the Art Gallery of New South Wales. This important body of work which continued intermittently until The Old Reaper (1909, Manchester City Art Gallery) was not without controversy. In 1902 the artist was challenged on the stance of his mowers by a correspondent of The Magazine of Art (p. 297), and in responding declared that he had ‘studied the action very carefully’ (K. McConkey, George Clausen and the Picture of English Rural Life, Glasgow, 2012, p. 105). He even supplied a diagram to demonstrate the position of the feet and the arc of the scythe’s swing. In the present case, the end of the stroke is shown and the blade of the implement can clearly be seen emerging from the grass at the mower’s left heel.
KMc.