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Lot Essay
George Clausen’s charming picture of girls fishing entitled Holiday Time seems innocent enough until we recognize its specific context. By 1885, when it was conceived, a succession of Education Acts had been passed in Parliament compelling girls and boys in rural areas to attend school up to the age of twelve.1 In recognition of the assistance they gave to their laboring parents, they were released from their studies at harvest times and awarded a May Day holiday.2 These were controversial decisions and the matter was not completely settled by the time the picture was painted. The provincial press often predicted economic disaster in the countryside when the market was saturated with cheap prairie grain in the early eighties and in some instances landowners, breaking the new laws by employing under-age children, were reported to the school inspectors and risked being arrested. School holidays remained hotly contested even into the 1890s.3
We must assume that the painter sought to draw attention to the issue, since in previous canvases such as Winter Work 1883 (Tate, London) and Labourers after Dinner, 1884 (Private Collection), he had recorded hardship, and the role of boys and girls in fieldworker gangs. At an early age boys were trained as shepherds, cowherds, mowers, reapers, hedgers and bird-scarers, because of their agility.4 Clausen documented all of these activities. Girls were not exempt; at hay-time and harvest, they too would be found in the fields. Unlike middle class city children, holiday time did not mean a trip to the seaside for country folk, but on holidays their offspring could roam freely in the fields they worked.5 Indeed, Clausen’s model for the present canvas also appears as one of The Little Haymakers, 1885 (fig. 1), a canvas of the same dimensions, being painted at the same time - and a subject Clausen had tackled while sketching in Holland in the late 1870s (see fig. 4).
However in Holiday Time, an upright format was adopted and this particular girl is shown full-length, in a carefully defined landscape setting that details grasses and wild flowers at her feet. Her hat is cast aside to reveal that in the manner of all country children, her hair is cut short.6 She wears a pinafore to protect her dress and stout boots.7 The river in which she fishes, a tributary of the Thames, stretches out behind her to reveal a companion and a family of ducks on the far bank, with a shepherd boy and his flock in a distant field. No adults patrol this ‘holiday’, and the rich farm land is that of Cookham Dene to which the artist had moved in May 1885.8
Holiday Time was thus one of the first pictures, begun as part of Clausen’s summer campaign. In its unfinished state in September, it was sent to his dealer, Charles Deschamps to be viewed, along with the completed Little Haymakers, by a potential purchaser.9 It was returned two days later but such was its promise that it was in fact acquired by the dealer before completion, and on 17 September the artist received a check for £100 for both works. While Little Haymakers was sent to the Institute of Oil Painters winter show, Holiday Time was retained for the more important Grosvenor Gallery exhibition, the following spring.10 When shown in 1886, for most critics it was ‘a simple story plainly told’, some commenting on the beauty of the landscape. The Saturday Review for instance recommended that some of the older artists, who were also exhibiting, would do well to study the girl in Clausen’s ‘admirably true Holiday Time’.11 Clausen had of course been exhibiting at the Grosvenor Gallery since 1880, the momentous year in which Jules Bastien-Lepage was given a small retrospective display within the summer show. This contained his controversial picture Les Foins 1878 (fig. 2), which, as The Spectator noted, attracted ‘a little knot of worshippers’ on a regular basis.12 The effect on the British artist was more or less immediate. In 1881 he left London for the fields of Hertfordshire and with Gleaners (fig. 3) in 1882, his work, and his presence in the art scene, changed significantly.
Upright canvases like Holiday Time, focusing on a single figure, but with careful management of the space around her, had been the consistent feature of Lepage’s London exhibits and while Clausen had produced a number of these, none was more sophisticated than the present example. There may have been some relief however, at the fact that Holiday Time appeared less challenging than some earlier works even though the familiar ‘follower of Bastien-Lepage’ mantra was recited. Since he was exhibiting coincidentally at the inaugural New English Art Club exhibition, the artist was seen as one of the leading practitioners of plein air naturalism derived from Paris. However Clausen’s ambitions were of a different order than what he referred to as ‘another small society’, and it was only when it left London to be shown in Liverpool that his role and the picture’s full significance were recognized.
Two things are important here. One is that on 7 August 1886 Clausen’s letter, with co-signatories, the Pre-Raphaelite, William Holman Hunt, and the Socialist artist and designer, Walter Crane, regarding the need for a ‘national exhibition of art’, run on ‘democratic’ lines, appeared in The Times. The Royal Academy, which was looked upon as the national exhibition was really a private society protecting the privileges of its members, by rejecting the new. 13 This publicly ignited a new movement in British Art, spearheaded by painters of Clausen’s generation - members of the Newlyn and Glasgow Schools and rural painters such as Henry Herbert La Thangue - who sought the overhaul of art education and exhibiting practices.14
The second is that the painter had been asked to join the hanging committee of the Autumn Exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool Corporation’s public art gallery, long recognized for its radical policies and where Holiday Time would be re-exhibited.15 Clausen was given complete control over Gallery 2, which contained the best of the Grosvenor and New English pictures, and a ‘great improvement on last year’ was observed by the Pall Mall Gazette.16 Looking at the present work The Liverpool Mercury noted that:
… His figures are wonderful in their truthful expression of light, sun, shadow, and colour … What is prized in the new school of realism, whether in scenes of real life, in landscape with figures, or in simple landscape, is sincerity of typical observation and what may be called reality of ambient atmosphere ...17
In this provincial setting it was clear that the new Naturalism had won the day and calm, undemonstrative observation of a scene that all could understand had been the artist’s objective. Within a febrile social, political and artistic moment, Clausen’s subject is nevertheless, one of quiet contemplation – of the sort that enables us to feel the flowers at our feet and the foliage overhead. On the river bank the girl appears pensive. ‘Lost love’ or some sham-medieval narrative was for others to represent. In Clausen’s mind the girl is simply scanning the river with a crude, makeshift fishing line. His picture may be prosaic, but it was not devoid of strength – or indeed, of poetry.
The picture’s story does not end there. In 1893 it was re-exhibited by Thomas McLean at his gallery in London’s Haymarket.18 McLean cleverly paired it with the early ‘Dutch-style’ Youth Haymakers, 1879 (fig. 4).19
While both pictures were regarded as ‘most attractive’ and ‘strong’, from these two works, critics could measure Clausen’s advance over those crucial early years.20 It was left to The Artist to tease the paintings apart, and for its reviewer, the north Holland Haymakers, now seemed ‘exceedingly quaint’. The fashion for Dutch subject matter, piloted in the exhibitions of the late 1870s by George Henry Boughton, had passed, and the young Clausen had moved on. The preference now was decidedly for Holiday Time, ‘which is well-painted throughout, and is delightfully “out of doors” in its effect’.21 If ‘Dutch’ pictures now seemed a world away, this thoughtful innocent, standing on a riverbank with a homemade fishing line of eight years earlier, remained urgently of the present.
We are very grateful to Professor Kenneth McConkey for preparing this catalogue entry.
1. Between 1867 and 1869, two Royal Commission Reports on ‘the Employment of Children, Young Persons and Women in Agriculture’ and the Education Act of 1870, led to a regulatory framework for compulsory education. However many farmers continued to see school attendance as a low priority until the passing of the Agricultural Children Act which came into force on 1 January 1875, followed by further Education Acts leading to school building in areas of depravation. Even at this point a framework of school inspection requiring further Acts, was necessary to ensure compliance.
2. Rural celebrations on May-Day had a long history to which school commissioners conceded; see Pamela Horn, The Victorian Country Child, 1975 (A. Sutton ed., 1984), pp. 178-182.
3. These are of necessity complex issues, and Clausen’s own experience was poignant when a new landlord turned over the estate on which his rented house was situated, to recreational use.
4. McConkey, 2012, pp. 55-56, 63-64.
5. For Clausen’s New English Art Club contemporaries such as Philip Wilson Steer, Walter Osborne, Blandford Fletcher and others, who depicted beach scenes with children, ‘holiday time’ exposed a very different social stratum.
6. Horn, 1975, pp. 24-25, notes that in country areas, girls’ hair was cropped for reasons of hygiene.
7. Boots were also both symbolic and real in that children were not admitted to school unless adequately shod.
8. George and Agnes Mary Clausen with their two children moved to Grove House, Cookham Dene, in Berkshire, from St Albans in Hertfordshire in May 1885. Although others exist to the east of Cookham Dene (now spelled Cookham Dean), it is most likely that the stream in Holiday Time is that which runs from Temple Park close to the edge of Quarry Wood, to the west of the village.
9. The artist’s account book notes that the picture, simply referred to as Girls fishing, was sent on 13 September 1885 and returned on the 15th.
10. A black and white illustration of the picture, then retitled Holiday Time, was also made – probably for illustration in Henry Blackburn’s Grosvenor Notes, but this was unused and remains unlocated.
11. 'The Grosvenor Gallery, Concluding Notice,' The Illustrated London News, vol. LXXXVIII, no. 2457, London, 22 May 1886, p. 555; 'Landscape at the Exhibitions,' The Saturday Review, vol. 61, no. 1596. London, 29 May 1886, p. 740.
12. The Spectator, 12 June 1880. p. 751; quoted in K. McConkey, ‘Un petite cercle de thuriféraires – Bastien-Lepage et la Grange Bretagne’, 48/14, La revue du Musée d’Orsay, n. 24, Printemps 2007, pp. 20-33.
13. Back in May 1886, Clausen, seeking a broad consensus, ‘instead of making another small society’, had written to Crane expressing these views; see W. Crane, An Artist’s Reminiscences, 1907 (Methuen & Co), p. 286; also McConkey, 2012, pp. 75-77. Despite all their efforts during the following two years, as Crane notes, ‘the walls of Jericho did not fall’.
14. K. McConkey, The New English, A History of the New English Art Club, 2006 (Royal Academy Publications), pp. 23-45.
15. McConkey, 2012, p. 76.
16. ‘Literary, Musical and Art Notes’, Pall Mall Gazette, 17 September 1886, p. 6.
17. ‘Walker Art Gallery – General Survey of the Autumn Exhibition’, The Liverpool Mercury, 4 September 1886, p. 6.
18. Despite recent advances in scholarship, work has yet to be carried out on McLean’s dealership. His forte seems to have been that by inter-trading with others, he was able to make interesting juxtapositions and bring neglected works to light. His penchant for Clausen was confirmed later in 1893 when he showed Gathering Potatoes, the artist’s NEAC canvas of 1888 (McConkey, 2012, pp. 84-86, fig. 129). There is no record of Holiday Time being sold until after its exhibition at McLean’s Gallery in March 1893 although at some point it passed to Arthur Jackson. Sometime after his death in 1928 it found a new home in the United States.
19. McConkey, 2012, p. 38, fig. 44.
20. ‘Mr McLean’s Gallery’ (sic), The Globe, 23 March 1893, p. 3; ‘Mr McLean’s Gallery’, The Morning Post, 29 March 1893, p. 4.
21. 'Exhibitions, Maclean's Gallery,' The Artist, vol. 14, no. 161, London, 1 April 1893, p. 124.
(fig. 1) Sir George Clausen, The Little Haymakers, 1885. Private collection.
(fig. 2) Jules Bastien-Lepage, Les Foins, 1878. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
(fig. 3) Sir George Clausen, Gleaners, 1882. Sold at Christie's, London, 24 November 2004, lot 40.
(fig. 4) Sir George Clausen, Young Haymakers, North Holland, 1879. Private collection.
We must assume that the painter sought to draw attention to the issue, since in previous canvases such as Winter Work 1883 (Tate, London) and Labourers after Dinner, 1884 (Private Collection), he had recorded hardship, and the role of boys and girls in fieldworker gangs. At an early age boys were trained as shepherds, cowherds, mowers, reapers, hedgers and bird-scarers, because of their agility.4 Clausen documented all of these activities. Girls were not exempt; at hay-time and harvest, they too would be found in the fields. Unlike middle class city children, holiday time did not mean a trip to the seaside for country folk, but on holidays their offspring could roam freely in the fields they worked.5 Indeed, Clausen’s model for the present canvas also appears as one of The Little Haymakers, 1885 (fig. 1), a canvas of the same dimensions, being painted at the same time - and a subject Clausen had tackled while sketching in Holland in the late 1870s (see fig. 4).
However in Holiday Time, an upright format was adopted and this particular girl is shown full-length, in a carefully defined landscape setting that details grasses and wild flowers at her feet. Her hat is cast aside to reveal that in the manner of all country children, her hair is cut short.6 She wears a pinafore to protect her dress and stout boots.7 The river in which she fishes, a tributary of the Thames, stretches out behind her to reveal a companion and a family of ducks on the far bank, with a shepherd boy and his flock in a distant field. No adults patrol this ‘holiday’, and the rich farm land is that of Cookham Dene to which the artist had moved in May 1885.8
Holiday Time was thus one of the first pictures, begun as part of Clausen’s summer campaign. In its unfinished state in September, it was sent to his dealer, Charles Deschamps to be viewed, along with the completed Little Haymakers, by a potential purchaser.9 It was returned two days later but such was its promise that it was in fact acquired by the dealer before completion, and on 17 September the artist received a check for £100 for both works. While Little Haymakers was sent to the Institute of Oil Painters winter show, Holiday Time was retained for the more important Grosvenor Gallery exhibition, the following spring.10 When shown in 1886, for most critics it was ‘a simple story plainly told’, some commenting on the beauty of the landscape. The Saturday Review for instance recommended that some of the older artists, who were also exhibiting, would do well to study the girl in Clausen’s ‘admirably true Holiday Time’.11 Clausen had of course been exhibiting at the Grosvenor Gallery since 1880, the momentous year in which Jules Bastien-Lepage was given a small retrospective display within the summer show. This contained his controversial picture Les Foins 1878 (fig. 2), which, as The Spectator noted, attracted ‘a little knot of worshippers’ on a regular basis.12 The effect on the British artist was more or less immediate. In 1881 he left London for the fields of Hertfordshire and with Gleaners (fig. 3) in 1882, his work, and his presence in the art scene, changed significantly.
Upright canvases like Holiday Time, focusing on a single figure, but with careful management of the space around her, had been the consistent feature of Lepage’s London exhibits and while Clausen had produced a number of these, none was more sophisticated than the present example. There may have been some relief however, at the fact that Holiday Time appeared less challenging than some earlier works even though the familiar ‘follower of Bastien-Lepage’ mantra was recited. Since he was exhibiting coincidentally at the inaugural New English Art Club exhibition, the artist was seen as one of the leading practitioners of plein air naturalism derived from Paris. However Clausen’s ambitions were of a different order than what he referred to as ‘another small society’, and it was only when it left London to be shown in Liverpool that his role and the picture’s full significance were recognized.
Two things are important here. One is that on 7 August 1886 Clausen’s letter, with co-signatories, the Pre-Raphaelite, William Holman Hunt, and the Socialist artist and designer, Walter Crane, regarding the need for a ‘national exhibition of art’, run on ‘democratic’ lines, appeared in The Times. The Royal Academy, which was looked upon as the national exhibition was really a private society protecting the privileges of its members, by rejecting the new. 13 This publicly ignited a new movement in British Art, spearheaded by painters of Clausen’s generation - members of the Newlyn and Glasgow Schools and rural painters such as Henry Herbert La Thangue - who sought the overhaul of art education and exhibiting practices.14
The second is that the painter had been asked to join the hanging committee of the Autumn Exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool Corporation’s public art gallery, long recognized for its radical policies and where Holiday Time would be re-exhibited.15 Clausen was given complete control over Gallery 2, which contained the best of the Grosvenor and New English pictures, and a ‘great improvement on last year’ was observed by the Pall Mall Gazette.16 Looking at the present work The Liverpool Mercury noted that:
… His figures are wonderful in their truthful expression of light, sun, shadow, and colour … What is prized in the new school of realism, whether in scenes of real life, in landscape with figures, or in simple landscape, is sincerity of typical observation and what may be called reality of ambient atmosphere ...17
In this provincial setting it was clear that the new Naturalism had won the day and calm, undemonstrative observation of a scene that all could understand had been the artist’s objective. Within a febrile social, political and artistic moment, Clausen’s subject is nevertheless, one of quiet contemplation – of the sort that enables us to feel the flowers at our feet and the foliage overhead. On the river bank the girl appears pensive. ‘Lost love’ or some sham-medieval narrative was for others to represent. In Clausen’s mind the girl is simply scanning the river with a crude, makeshift fishing line. His picture may be prosaic, but it was not devoid of strength – or indeed, of poetry.
The picture’s story does not end there. In 1893 it was re-exhibited by Thomas McLean at his gallery in London’s Haymarket.18 McLean cleverly paired it with the early ‘Dutch-style’ Youth Haymakers, 1879 (fig. 4).19
While both pictures were regarded as ‘most attractive’ and ‘strong’, from these two works, critics could measure Clausen’s advance over those crucial early years.20 It was left to The Artist to tease the paintings apart, and for its reviewer, the north Holland Haymakers, now seemed ‘exceedingly quaint’. The fashion for Dutch subject matter, piloted in the exhibitions of the late 1870s by George Henry Boughton, had passed, and the young Clausen had moved on. The preference now was decidedly for Holiday Time, ‘which is well-painted throughout, and is delightfully “out of doors” in its effect’.21 If ‘Dutch’ pictures now seemed a world away, this thoughtful innocent, standing on a riverbank with a homemade fishing line of eight years earlier, remained urgently of the present.
We are very grateful to Professor Kenneth McConkey for preparing this catalogue entry.
1. Between 1867 and 1869, two Royal Commission Reports on ‘the Employment of Children, Young Persons and Women in Agriculture’ and the Education Act of 1870, led to a regulatory framework for compulsory education. However many farmers continued to see school attendance as a low priority until the passing of the Agricultural Children Act which came into force on 1 January 1875, followed by further Education Acts leading to school building in areas of depravation. Even at this point a framework of school inspection requiring further Acts, was necessary to ensure compliance.
2. Rural celebrations on May-Day had a long history to which school commissioners conceded; see Pamela Horn, The Victorian Country Child, 1975 (A. Sutton ed., 1984), pp. 178-182.
3. These are of necessity complex issues, and Clausen’s own experience was poignant when a new landlord turned over the estate on which his rented house was situated, to recreational use.
4. McConkey, 2012, pp. 55-56, 63-64.
5. For Clausen’s New English Art Club contemporaries such as Philip Wilson Steer, Walter Osborne, Blandford Fletcher and others, who depicted beach scenes with children, ‘holiday time’ exposed a very different social stratum.
6. Horn, 1975, pp. 24-25, notes that in country areas, girls’ hair was cropped for reasons of hygiene.
7. Boots were also both symbolic and real in that children were not admitted to school unless adequately shod.
8. George and Agnes Mary Clausen with their two children moved to Grove House, Cookham Dene, in Berkshire, from St Albans in Hertfordshire in May 1885. Although others exist to the east of Cookham Dene (now spelled Cookham Dean), it is most likely that the stream in Holiday Time is that which runs from Temple Park close to the edge of Quarry Wood, to the west of the village.
9. The artist’s account book notes that the picture, simply referred to as Girls fishing, was sent on 13 September 1885 and returned on the 15th.
10. A black and white illustration of the picture, then retitled Holiday Time, was also made – probably for illustration in Henry Blackburn’s Grosvenor Notes, but this was unused and remains unlocated.
11. 'The Grosvenor Gallery, Concluding Notice,' The Illustrated London News, vol. LXXXVIII, no. 2457, London, 22 May 1886, p. 555; 'Landscape at the Exhibitions,' The Saturday Review, vol. 61, no. 1596. London, 29 May 1886, p. 740.
12. The Spectator, 12 June 1880. p. 751; quoted in K. McConkey, ‘Un petite cercle de thuriféraires – Bastien-Lepage et la Grange Bretagne’, 48/14, La revue du Musée d’Orsay, n. 24, Printemps 2007, pp. 20-33.
13. Back in May 1886, Clausen, seeking a broad consensus, ‘instead of making another small society’, had written to Crane expressing these views; see W. Crane, An Artist’s Reminiscences, 1907 (Methuen & Co), p. 286; also McConkey, 2012, pp. 75-77. Despite all their efforts during the following two years, as Crane notes, ‘the walls of Jericho did not fall’.
14. K. McConkey, The New English, A History of the New English Art Club, 2006 (Royal Academy Publications), pp. 23-45.
15. McConkey, 2012, p. 76.
16. ‘Literary, Musical and Art Notes’, Pall Mall Gazette, 17 September 1886, p. 6.
17. ‘Walker Art Gallery – General Survey of the Autumn Exhibition’, The Liverpool Mercury, 4 September 1886, p. 6.
18. Despite recent advances in scholarship, work has yet to be carried out on McLean’s dealership. His forte seems to have been that by inter-trading with others, he was able to make interesting juxtapositions and bring neglected works to light. His penchant for Clausen was confirmed later in 1893 when he showed Gathering Potatoes, the artist’s NEAC canvas of 1888 (McConkey, 2012, pp. 84-86, fig. 129). There is no record of Holiday Time being sold until after its exhibition at McLean’s Gallery in March 1893 although at some point it passed to Arthur Jackson. Sometime after his death in 1928 it found a new home in the United States.
19. McConkey, 2012, p. 38, fig. 44.
20. ‘Mr McLean’s Gallery’ (sic), The Globe, 23 March 1893, p. 3; ‘Mr McLean’s Gallery’, The Morning Post, 29 March 1893, p. 4.
21. 'Exhibitions, Maclean's Gallery,' The Artist, vol. 14, no. 161, London, 1 April 1893, p. 124.
(fig. 1) Sir George Clausen, The Little Haymakers, 1885. Private collection.
(fig. 2) Jules Bastien-Lepage, Les Foins, 1878. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
(fig. 3) Sir George Clausen, Gleaners, 1882. Sold at Christie's, London, 24 November 2004, lot 40.
(fig. 4) Sir George Clausen, Young Haymakers, North Holland, 1879. Private collection.