Kenneth McConkey, Emeritus Professor of Art History at the University of Northumbria, explores the significance of an early work by Sir George Clausen, A Wood Nymph, which has recently resurfaced and is now part of our exhibition in St. James's.
Throughout the first half of a long career, dominated by close observation of field and woodland workers, George Clausen had painted numerous head studies.1 Never portraits in the strict sense of commissioned paintings of identifiable individuals, these images exemplified a strand in contemporary painting that grew from the demand for social recording. Like his lost Woodman, they were shown in characteristic costume, occasionally displaying the tools of their trade.
Sir George Clausen RA NEAC RWS (1852-1944)
A Wood Nymph, oil on canvas, 51 x 43 cm
During his student years of the 1870s Clausen had seen prominent Academicians – Luke Fildes, Frank Holl, the Bavarian expatriate, Hubert von Herkomer, and others – pull characters from the streets into the studio to give the ring of truth to their scenes of city life, and these naturalistic ‘Heads of the People’ were converted into a long series portraying urban and rural workers in the popular illustrated weeklies.2 Young painters of the following decade – Henry Herbert La Thangue, Stanhope Alexander Forbes, James Guthrie, and their Newlyn and Glasgow School contemporaries inherited this practice.
The young Clausen’s work, following the techniques of French Naturalism derived from Bastien-Lepage, inspired these countrywide developments in painting and studies of country folk around his various homes in rural Hertfordshire, Berkshire and Essex, now regarded as some of his finest works, had been a mainstay throughout his youth and middle years.3 Among these The End of a Winter’s Day, 1885 with its echoes of Jean-François Millet, had been the most influential.4
Here Clausen had pulled back from his subject to reveal the harsh winter labour when the woods were thinned, trenches re-dug and storm-damaged boughs removed. For all its literal truth, there is more than a hint of symbolic purpose when time stretches from the sinking sun on a dank day to the rise and fall of generations. Twenty-five years later, the classical turn in Clausen’s work, signalled in 1910 with A Wood Nymph, was an extraordinary step.
Now Professor of Painting at the Royal Academy Schools, and in his late fifties, corralled in St John’s Wood, London, the painter, whether he saw himself in these terms or not, had become an establishment figure. In the intervening period, while he remained committed to the realities of life in woods and fields, his handling had relaxed, his work had become more colourful, and he had taken the Impressionists’ interest in atmospherics on board. And although he retained regular contacts with the Essex countryside after his move to the city in 1905, different means of escape now presented themselves.
In 1893 he had been elected, honoris causa, to the Art Workers Guild and in 1909 served as its master.5 It was now possible for him and his wife, Agnes Mary, to take holidays in Italy and Greece organized by one of its future masters, Thomas Okey, the Spitalfields basket-maker-cum-Cambridge don and respected author.6 These leisurely affairs permitted visits to museums, as well as watercolour sketching of classical ruins, Renaissance churches and Greek and Roman landscapes. A window had opened.
It was nevertheless one that did not drive Clausen back to the cast rooms of his youth. Classical features would be found in the faces of modern models. His nymph would not display the smooth olive tones of Mediterranean racial types, nor would she adopt the anodyne features of an ill-fated Victorian Eurydice or Ariadne as in the svelte classical heads of Frederic, Lord Leighton.7
In these declining years of high Victorian classicism, surviving Academy stalwarts, such as Lawrence Alma-Tadema, remained unchanged, while the perception of Pharaonic, Hellenic and Roman civilizations, their myths and legends, was being overhauled by modern historians and archaeologists.8 A fundamental move from myth to history was under way.9
At the same time, in Clausen’s work, there was an urgent sense that in the mere observation of another human being, one was diving to realms that were mysterious and profound. It lay as much in the handling of pigment as in the treatment of flesh and facial features. Reading the current reviews of the A Wood Nymph, an instinctive understanding emerges. Here was ‘almost boyish …candour’, ‘excellent’ in its colouring and ‘the play of light’, and ‘full of joy in life and restrained exuberance’ according to some reviewers. Of these, The Evening Standard summed up A Wood Nymph as,
Imaginative and tender … with face so healthy; hardly a touch of formal prettiness – a Realist, purely, but a Realist who calls us to the love of simple, natural things.10
This wood nymph grew from nature, and the contemporary, not from the prototypes of yesteryear.
Thereafter Clausen returned to the subject with Little Wild One in 1912 and remained preoccupied with portraying the modern classical nude in Primavera in 1914.11 A Symbolist, sub-Puvis de Chavannes, in Renaissance, 1915 (Belgian Embassy, London) and Youth Mourning 1916 emerged as war raged in western Europe .12 And the ‘Realist’ of the present work was subsumed by an allegorical syntax that sought to address the strong feelings that the conflict engendered.
In 1910, optimism, expressed in A Wood Nymph, remained, and such feelings of moral outrage were yet to emerge. At this point forward thinking encouraged Clausen to develop the formidable iconographic legacy of the 1880s in a totally new direction. The Naturalism of his youth had always been more than a snapshot. He had sought in its forms and its light and shade, the very essence of its meaning and truth. Twenty-five years later, there was no greater challenge to these principles than to find innocence, tenderness, exuberance and health in a sprite’s countenance, when formerly, his woodsman had exemplified only toil. That search had returned with greater complexity in the cherry-ripe face of his model in 1910, for woodlands were also places of magic.
For further reference see Kenneth McConkey, George Clausen and the Picture of English Rural Life, 2012, (Atelier Books, Edinburgh), pp. 62, 87, 116-7.
Ronald Pickvance, English Influences on Vincent Van Gogh, 1974-5, (exhibition catalogue, University of Nottingham and Arts Council).
Kenneth McConkey, ‘<Un petit cercle de thuriféraires> – Bastien-Lepage et la Grande Bretagne’, 48/14 La revue du Musée d’Orsay, Printemps 2007, pp. 20-33.
For further discussion of this and closely related works see McConkey 2012, pp. 65-6.
The guild, as its name suggests, had been formed in 1884, to advance education in the crafts and maintain their standards and values in a world increasingly dominated by mechanization.
The Clausens had five children, now all in their late teens and early twenties, and up to this point, holidays, when possible, were taken in England.
There were of course Naturalistic nudes painted in woodland glades during the 1880s such as Alexander Harrison’s En Arcadie 1886, (Musée d’Orsay, Paris), that challenged the premises of art as a form of social, or indeed, racial recording.
Serious systematic exploration of ancient sites such as Pompeii in Italy or Gizah in Egypt only began after the risorgimento in the 1860s and the imposition British rule in Egypt in the 1880s, with the arrival of archaeologists such as Guiseppe Fiorelli and Flinders Petrie.
New knowledge arriving with artefacts retrieved from such sites was, in Clausen’s day, leading to an intellectual overhaul in the perception of the ancient world that lasted from Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson’s The Greek View of Life (1896, revised 1909), to Jérôme Carcopino’s classic Daily Life in Ancient Rome (1940).
‘Royal Academy - Fine Examples of Portraiture – Second Notice’, Evening Standard, 3 May 1910, p. 5. The reference to ‘health’ is significant in the relation to the current ‘condition of England’ debates initiated by Charles F Masterman’s study of the working classes (1909).
The model for both A Wood Nymph and Little Wild One is unidentified, but likely to be the same. When sold at Christie’s in 1983, it was clear that the pan pipes and surrounding foliage in Little Wild One had been painted over, while Primavera, (Private Collection), had suffered at the hands of a suffragette; see McConkey 2020, p. 157 (note 98), 162-165.
Kenneth McConkey, ‘Hope in time of War: George Clausen’s ‘Renaissance’ rediscovered’, Burlington Magazine, vol 160, no 1388, November 2018, pp. 938-945.
A fully illustrated catalogue for our summer exhibition of British Impressionism is available to buy online and from our gallery in St. James's
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