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Lot Essay
On a visit to Clausen's studio at Widdington, Essex on 20 October 1895, David Croal Thomson, manager at the Goupil dealership, surveyed his recent work and agreed prices. Among the pictures Thomson saw was Solitude (August Moonrise), a Millet-esque nocturne depicting a fallow field. The work was a pendant to a larger canvas, The Plough, (sold Christie's c. 1985) which Clausen had painted in the previous year. Where the earlier picture shows an abandoned plough, here the foreground contains a harrow. Three weeks after Thomson's visit, on 9 November 1895, Solitude was dispatched to Goupil's, but no record is made in the artist's account book of its eventual sale.
The picture prompted its own sequence. Clausen began to draw scenes of harrowing and two years later embarked upon a large canvas for the Royal Academy in 1898. A monumental work that was later destroyed in a fire, The Harrow depicted a boy struggling to control an unruly plough-horse as he tries to turn the animal at the edge of a field. There is no such drama in Solitude, merely that stillness which falls with a late summer moonrise.
KMc.
The picture prompted its own sequence. Clausen began to draw scenes of harrowing and two years later embarked upon a large canvas for the Royal Academy in 1898. A monumental work that was later destroyed in a fire, The Harrow depicted a boy struggling to control an unruly plough-horse as he tries to turn the animal at the edge of a field. There is no such drama in Solitude, merely that stillness which falls with a late summer moonrise.
KMc.