Footnotes

Provenance
Sale, Christie's London, Artist's studio sale, 19 October 1945, lot 148, sold for 40 guineas
Sale, Christie's London, 11 March 1994, lot 7
with Nicholas Brown Gallery, Amersham, 1994
Private collection, UK

Exhibited
London, Leicester Galleries, Paintings and Drawings by George Clausen RA, RWS, 1912, no.6

Literature
The Athenaeum, 'Paintings and Drawings by Mr George Clausen', 19 October 1912, p.453

In October 1912 George Clausen staged an exhibition of new work at the Leicester Galleries which was favourably received. Despite the fact that at this point in his career he was caught up in 'public service' – planning and delivering art school curricula in the Royal Academy Schools, the Slade, the British School at Rome, and for the Girls Public Day School Trust – he was still committed to experimentation, according to The Athenaeum. Comparing the present work with the 'homely' cottage garden pictures of his friend, the recently deceased James Charles, its reviewer found Clausen's work 'more occupied with the science of appearances' and, in common with others, remarked on his undiminished taste for experimentation. At the same time, The Studio (vol.LVII, 1912, p.156) commented particularly on 'his interpretation of sunlight, broken by the contours of thickly foliaged branches of great trees in country lanes ...' Clearly the present canvas was much in mind.

Clausen had a habit of quoting Manet's dictum that 'light is the most important person in a picture' and for him the country lanes of Essex provided sensations equivalent to the Fontainebleau sous bois of the Barbizon painters. Like their successors, the Impressionists, he was enthralled by fractured sunlight that fell through foliage. A clump of ivy-clad trees was enough to hold his attention on many occasions. There was a world of colour in the swaying boughs, and for him, their movement, bending and fluttering in a summer breeze, was life itself. With his pupils at the Royal Academy Schools he would reflect on the difficulty of painting a tree 'and making it live'. Painstaking study of the parts seldom added up to the sense of the whole – the sense 'that a tree gives us when we look at it in passing ...' Immersed in 'the infinity of detail ... we miss it somehow'. To catch the spirit of a group of trees, students must see the whole, '... spreading up and rounding into the sky, with light shining on it and through it' (Lectures, 1913, p.101). In short, it was more important to feel for nature's pulse than to carry out an autopsy.

The country lane, used almost exclusively in the Edwardian years by fieldworkers, plough-horses and livestock, provided these reflections, as much as the setting for works such as Clausen's The Gleaners Returning, 1908 (Tate), to which the present canvas relates.

While in the inter-war period these quiet roads began to be invaded by cyclists, motor-cars and day-trippers – in 1912 they remained simple haunts for the painter in which an unprepossessing group of roadside trees was enough to recharge that powerful consciousness of the animating force of nature.

We are grateful to Professor Kenneth McConkey for his assistance in cataloguing this lot.