Study of a female nude

Although the most striking and unusual paintings that Clausen would produce in the years leading up to the Great War were classical nudes, in 1894 he was yet to paint such a subject and so it seems that this drawing stands alone, rather than being a study for a painting. The pose used here with the sitter's hands in her hair, raised above her head, was returned to in Primavera, perhaps Clausen's most successful and best-known nude, painted in 1914 and sold in these Rooms, 17 June 2014, lot 95.
Henry Harris Brown, to whom the drawing is inscribed, was a painter, predominantly of portraits, who studied under Bougereau and exhibited alongside Clausen.