A Shady Corner

Age did not dull Clausen's enthusiasm for painting. In 1940, when he was eighty-eight, the Chantrey Bequest purchased his splendid My Back Garden (1940, Tate Britain) for the Tate Gallery. It was the culmination of a series of garden pictures which began in 1910 when From a London Back Window in Winter (unlocated) was shown at the Royal Academy. During this thirty year period the Clausens lived at 61 Carlton Hill in St John's Wood, having moved there in 1905 shortly after his appointment as Professor of Painting at the Academy. However it took five years for this leafy north London enclave to creep into his work, and only then did back garden motifs seen from bedroom windows became a recurring subject.

The present example is unusual in that it looks down into a neighbour's garden in which a man sits in a deckchair reading. The painter espies him stroked by sunlight under the blossoming trees. It is a typical scene of suburban calm and one that greatly appealed to Clausen. In old age he too would sit sketching the garden trees whether in London, or at Hillside, his country retreat near Dunmow in Essex. Nothing was more challenging, and in this case, the man in the white hat was a surrogate for the contemplative calm the painter sought - even in the metropolis. Sadly, this moment was not to last, and after the final Chantrey purchase, on account of the Blitz, he and his wife were obliged to leave the sunny gardens of Carlton Hill never to return.
KMc.