George Clausen
1852-1944
Born in London, Clausen was the son of a decorative painter of Danish descent. He studied at South Kensington art school and at the Académie Julian in Paris. He was a founding member of the New English Art Club in 1886 and was elected an RA in 1908. He was Professor of Painting in the Royal Academy Schools during the early 1900s and he published his lectures there under the titles Six Lectures on Painting (1904) and Aims and Ideals of Art (1906). He was Knighted in 1927. Clausen painted figure and landscape subjects in oils and watercolours and was also a distinguished pastellist and printmaker. His style was much influenced by the French plein air school and particularly the work of Bastien-Lepage. Writing about Lepage, Clausen observed: '... he has a high place among modern artists, not only as one of the first who realized figures in simple outdoor lighting, but for the unaffected sincerity of his work.' Clausen's interest in creating honest, naturalistic pictures is conveyed eloquently in the following passage from his essay on Landscape and Open-air Painting: 'Everything in nature is moving - not necessarily quickly, but nothing stands still for us; this sense of life and movement must be given in a picture with the measure of detail which may be necessary, and the result reveals the artist's mind, showing on which qualities, and in what degree, his attention was fixed.' The Bradford City Art Galleries arranged a major retrospective exhibition of his work in 1980 and a detailed catalogue about his life and work was prepared by Kenneth McConkey.
Works Available
Farm Workers
Little Margaret