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Lot Essay
Rejoicing after the rain: Early Summer was the centrepiece in George Clausen’s solo exhibition at the Leicester Galleries in London in October 1912.
The largest work in the show it was clearly intended to draw together the most significant strands in his work up that point, and to demonstrate that he was moving on. He was, as one critic noted, always ‘experimental’, and the range of subjects on display indicated this, but critical opinion circled around the present work and sought to unlock its significance. An ‘old-time realist, who began as the uncompromising disciple of Bastien-Lepage’, Clausen was now ‘our great romantic painter’ said one current reviewer (‘Gallery and Studio: Watercolours in Pall Mall’, Pall Mall Gazette, 7 November 1912, p. 7; for a full account of Clausen’s career see K. McConkey, George Clausen and the picture of English rural life, 2012). Earth and sky on which human subsistence depended, came graphically together in Rejoicing after the rain, Early Summer. But more than this, the work encapsulated thirty years of practice and looked forward to classic canvases yet to come.
Clausen had indeed been a dogmatic ‘realist’, or more correctly, a proponent of ‘rural Naturalism’. He had been a central figure in the ‘Anglo-French’ movement that led to the formation of the New English Art Club in 1886 – the leading figure in a generation that swept away the degraded Ruskinian Pre-Raphaelitism of the day. By the turn of the new century, he had adopted an Impressionist palette, to the point where his work was compared with that of Claude Monet. The Royal Academy, which he had sought to reform as a youth, now offered him its prestigious Professorship of Painting, an establishment post which, as his lectures reveal, made no concessions to his radicalism. That he was now a ‘romantic’ however, begs some explanation and it could be found in the centrepiece of his Leicester Galleries show.
Not long before the opening of the exhibition, Clausen sold A Morning in June to Sir Hugh Lane, who was helping to build the municipal art collection for the city of Johannesburg.
This upright picture, with its big sky and tall trees had been reworked after five years and Rejoicing after the rain … may well have been intended as its companion in what, for the artist, was a new format. A Morning in June had first been shown at the Royal Academy in 1905 (no. 54) without figures. Low horizons and similar figure-to-field relationships characterise both works. When the distinguished critic Charles Lewis Hind approved the ‘repose, simplicity, breadth, light, and …gaiety’ of Lane’s acquisition, it augured well for the reception of his forthcoming exhibition piece (C. L. Hind, The Consolations of a Critic, 1911, p. 90; quoted in McConkey, 2012, p. 160.)
At first press writers noted the things with which they were already familiar. For several years, on his return expeditions to rural Essex, Clausen had been studying the elements of landscape. As Professor of Painting in Academy from 1904, and with children attending colleges in London, the Clausens moved back to the city in the summer of 1905. Tall beech trees and spreading oaks were filling his sketchbooks, as were the heavily thatched workers’ cottages at the villages of Clavering and Tilty. During his fifteen years living at Widdington, he had often noted the changing colours of landscape as the seasons changed – and how the red earth would disappear under new growth. It was mirrored in the young labourer whose wife and infant stand over him at this seedtime. The ‘stirring of dull roots by spring rain’, described by T.S. Eliot, had begun in this tall canvas with what The Evening Standard described as ‘a “shout” of light coming down from the heavens upon the little figures working in the wet fields’. For the Pall Mall Gazette, this expressed ‘the new joyousness and uprising of landscape after a refreshing shower’, while The Westminster Gazette concluded that ‘for a full appreciation of this painting one needs something more than casual acquaintance with the work of the artist – a measure of knowledge, of intimacy even: but given that, the reward is certain’.
‘Knowledge’, ‘intimacy’ suggested that figures planting and harvesting had been studied in depth over many years and their grouping sometimes echoed the work of the great masters of mid-century realism, such as Jean-François Millet. Clausen may well have seen the Munich painting at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889. He would also have been familiar with it in reproduction in David Croal Thomson’s The Barbizon School, 1890, p. 228 (illustrated). Thomson was of course his dealer. Clausen’s The Harvest 1895, (Private Collection) was sold in Sotheby’s, New York in 2001.
It was however, the current ‘condition of England’ debate that made this grouping appropriate. According to social reformers, the family unit, sustained by good food and fresh air, produced a healthy population, while factory conditions and overcrowding in cities did not. The rural labourer could look to the sky and ‘rejoice’ while his urban equivalent was exploited, downtrodden and potentially seditious. This message came with a force that took painters of Clausen’s generation back to the pre-industrial world of Constable and Turner – artists now seen in Britain as the true forerunners of Impressionism. The 1890s had witnessed a rise in the critical estimation of Constable’s work. Denigrated by Ruskin, the great East Anglian romantic, was lauded for those very primordial values captured in his landscapes and sky studies, that had recently been donated to the Victoria and Albert Museum – works that are likely to have inspired Clausen’s cloudscape, seen in its most dramatic form in Rejoicing after the rain … Future large canvases such as the magisterial In the Fields in June, 1914 would be impossible without it.
Clausen must have been delighted to learn that his old friend Sir Herbert Roberts, later Lord Clwyd, had purchased Rejoicing after the rain. Since no references to Rejoicing after the rain … are made in the artist’s account book for the period, we must assume that Roberts purchased the painting directly from the exhibition. The collector had been introduced to the painter at the time of his marriage to Hannah, the daughter of William Sproston Caine in 1893. Clausen was commissioned to paint Hannah’s portrait (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool) in 1894 (see McConkey 2012, p. 114). During the Great War, the Clausens visited Bryngwenallt, the Roberts’ gothic mansion in North Wales, from which the artist painted The Vale of Clwyd (McConkey 2012, p. 171). Both Caine and Roberts were Liberal Members of Parliament and Clausen collectors. A few months before the opening of the Leicester Galleries exhibition, Roberts had purchased Clausen’s The Road at the Royal Academy, a work that also contained tall trees screening the sunlight.
In Rejoicing after the rain … however, Roberts had acquired one of the artist’s most significant mature paintings. Not only does it refer to good husbandry of the land, but its bold address to prevailing atmospherics fix a time and a place. Presiding overall is one of the most majestic of Clausen’s trees – a symbol of perpetual renewal and rebirth that connected past, present and future in an unbroken rhythmic sequence. [For a full account of Clausen’s The Budding Tree, shown at the Academy in 1914, see C. Beetles ed., A Century of British Art, 2021 (ex. cat.), pp. 12-14.]
We are grateful to Professor Kenneth McConkey for preparing this catalogue entry.
The largest work in the show it was clearly intended to draw together the most significant strands in his work up that point, and to demonstrate that he was moving on. He was, as one critic noted, always ‘experimental’, and the range of subjects on display indicated this, but critical opinion circled around the present work and sought to unlock its significance. An ‘old-time realist, who began as the uncompromising disciple of Bastien-Lepage’, Clausen was now ‘our great romantic painter’ said one current reviewer (‘Gallery and Studio: Watercolours in Pall Mall’, Pall Mall Gazette, 7 November 1912, p. 7; for a full account of Clausen’s career see K. McConkey, George Clausen and the picture of English rural life, 2012). Earth and sky on which human subsistence depended, came graphically together in Rejoicing after the rain, Early Summer. But more than this, the work encapsulated thirty years of practice and looked forward to classic canvases yet to come.
Clausen had indeed been a dogmatic ‘realist’, or more correctly, a proponent of ‘rural Naturalism’. He had been a central figure in the ‘Anglo-French’ movement that led to the formation of the New English Art Club in 1886 – the leading figure in a generation that swept away the degraded Ruskinian Pre-Raphaelitism of the day. By the turn of the new century, he had adopted an Impressionist palette, to the point where his work was compared with that of Claude Monet. The Royal Academy, which he had sought to reform as a youth, now offered him its prestigious Professorship of Painting, an establishment post which, as his lectures reveal, made no concessions to his radicalism. That he was now a ‘romantic’ however, begs some explanation and it could be found in the centrepiece of his Leicester Galleries show.
Not long before the opening of the exhibition, Clausen sold A Morning in June to Sir Hugh Lane, who was helping to build the municipal art collection for the city of Johannesburg.
This upright picture, with its big sky and tall trees had been reworked after five years and Rejoicing after the rain … may well have been intended as its companion in what, for the artist, was a new format. A Morning in June had first been shown at the Royal Academy in 1905 (no. 54) without figures. Low horizons and similar figure-to-field relationships characterise both works. When the distinguished critic Charles Lewis Hind approved the ‘repose, simplicity, breadth, light, and …gaiety’ of Lane’s acquisition, it augured well for the reception of his forthcoming exhibition piece (C. L. Hind, The Consolations of a Critic, 1911, p. 90; quoted in McConkey, 2012, p. 160.)
At first press writers noted the things with which they were already familiar. For several years, on his return expeditions to rural Essex, Clausen had been studying the elements of landscape. As Professor of Painting in Academy from 1904, and with children attending colleges in London, the Clausens moved back to the city in the summer of 1905. Tall beech trees and spreading oaks were filling his sketchbooks, as were the heavily thatched workers’ cottages at the villages of Clavering and Tilty. During his fifteen years living at Widdington, he had often noted the changing colours of landscape as the seasons changed – and how the red earth would disappear under new growth. It was mirrored in the young labourer whose wife and infant stand over him at this seedtime. The ‘stirring of dull roots by spring rain’, described by T.S. Eliot, had begun in this tall canvas with what The Evening Standard described as ‘a “shout” of light coming down from the heavens upon the little figures working in the wet fields’. For the Pall Mall Gazette, this expressed ‘the new joyousness and uprising of landscape after a refreshing shower’, while The Westminster Gazette concluded that ‘for a full appreciation of this painting one needs something more than casual acquaintance with the work of the artist – a measure of knowledge, of intimacy even: but given that, the reward is certain’.
‘Knowledge’, ‘intimacy’ suggested that figures planting and harvesting had been studied in depth over many years and their grouping sometimes echoed the work of the great masters of mid-century realism, such as Jean-François Millet. Clausen may well have seen the Munich painting at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1889. He would also have been familiar with it in reproduction in David Croal Thomson’s The Barbizon School, 1890, p. 228 (illustrated). Thomson was of course his dealer. Clausen’s The Harvest 1895, (Private Collection) was sold in Sotheby’s, New York in 2001.
It was however, the current ‘condition of England’ debate that made this grouping appropriate. According to social reformers, the family unit, sustained by good food and fresh air, produced a healthy population, while factory conditions and overcrowding in cities did not. The rural labourer could look to the sky and ‘rejoice’ while his urban equivalent was exploited, downtrodden and potentially seditious. This message came with a force that took painters of Clausen’s generation back to the pre-industrial world of Constable and Turner – artists now seen in Britain as the true forerunners of Impressionism. The 1890s had witnessed a rise in the critical estimation of Constable’s work. Denigrated by Ruskin, the great East Anglian romantic, was lauded for those very primordial values captured in his landscapes and sky studies, that had recently been donated to the Victoria and Albert Museum – works that are likely to have inspired Clausen’s cloudscape, seen in its most dramatic form in Rejoicing after the rain … Future large canvases such as the magisterial In the Fields in June, 1914 would be impossible without it.
Clausen must have been delighted to learn that his old friend Sir Herbert Roberts, later Lord Clwyd, had purchased Rejoicing after the rain. Since no references to Rejoicing after the rain … are made in the artist’s account book for the period, we must assume that Roberts purchased the painting directly from the exhibition. The collector had been introduced to the painter at the time of his marriage to Hannah, the daughter of William Sproston Caine in 1893. Clausen was commissioned to paint Hannah’s portrait (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool) in 1894 (see McConkey 2012, p. 114). During the Great War, the Clausens visited Bryngwenallt, the Roberts’ gothic mansion in North Wales, from which the artist painted The Vale of Clwyd (McConkey 2012, p. 171). Both Caine and Roberts were Liberal Members of Parliament and Clausen collectors. A few months before the opening of the Leicester Galleries exhibition, Roberts had purchased Clausen’s The Road at the Royal Academy, a work that also contained tall trees screening the sunlight.
In Rejoicing after the rain … however, Roberts had acquired one of the artist’s most significant mature paintings. Not only does it refer to good husbandry of the land, but its bold address to prevailing atmospherics fix a time and a place. Presiding overall is one of the most majestic of Clausen’s trees – a symbol of perpetual renewal and rebirth that connected past, present and future in an unbroken rhythmic sequence. [For a full account of Clausen’s The Budding Tree, shown at the Academy in 1914, see C. Beetles ed., A Century of British Art, 2021 (ex. cat.), pp. 12-14.]
We are grateful to Professor Kenneth McConkey for preparing this catalogue entry.