Footnotes

Provenance
John Russel Taylor, circa 1980.
With Fosse Gallery, Stow-On-The-Wold.
Private collection, UK (acquired from the above in 1983).

Exhibited
London, Goupil Gallery, Paintings and Drawings by George Clausen ARA, RWS, 1902, no. 16 (£175).

Literature
'Art Pencillings', The Echo, 4 November 1902, p. 1.
'Mr Clausen's Exhibition', Pall Mall Gazette, 8 November 1902, p. 2.
AJF, 'Art Notes – An Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings by G Clausen ARA', The Morning Leader, 8 November 1902, p. 4.
'Art Notes', Illustrated London News, 15 November 1902, p. 760.
'Studio Talk', The Studio, vol. 27, November 1902, p. 207.


It is late summer when a man takes his scythe to trim the orchard floor. He works around the trees for the fruit they bear must not fall into long grass. As he does so, every now and then the sun breaks through and catches the side of his face and the sleeves of his shirt as he bends into the task. These are rhythmic movements; a brisk tidy; he is not posing for a photographer¹.There is no time for the painter to be seduced by wild-flowers, bark texture or overhead foliage; to be true, this impression must be caught in the moment.

In the mid-1880s, Clausen had studied the action of the mower, wielding this ancient instrument in nearby fields and shortly after his move to Essex in 1891, he had produced the classic The Mowers (1892, The Collection: Art & Archaeology in Lincolnshire, Usher Gallery), the culmination of numerous studies of the figure in motion. The orchard setting was even more emblematic. The cultivation of these small enclaves on farms in the Home Counties and the south west dated back to medieval times when tenants and itinerant labourers were paid in part with free cider². After 1887 this practice was outlawed, but illegality did not stop its continuation into the twentieth century³.

After his marriage in 1881, when Clausen first moved from London to the Hertfordshire countryside, a little neighbouring orchard had been a sanctuary in which to practice and perfect the observational strictures of plein air naturalism – methods associated with Jules Bastien-Lepage⁴. When hay and corn had already been cut and the fruit was ripe, a tenant might take his scythe to this task, and the artist had been present as an observer⁵. When he returned to the subject in 1898, technique and treatment had developed in a more individual way. The present painting was then held over until November 1902 when Clausen staged his first solo exhibition at the Goupil Gallery in Regent Street. The exhibition, consisting of twenty oil paintings and thirty pastels, was greeted as a succès d'estime⁶.

The artist, one reporter recalled, had been praised by novelist and critic, George Moore, for moving away from the dogma of naturalism – 'an artistic cul-de-sac' - to a freer, more personal and impressionistic style. The process had continued until the end of the decade when The Little Orchard was painted⁷. It was a 'brilliantly luminous record of sunlight, very sensitively observed...' full of light and movement that suggested 'the lush luxuriance of country in summer'⁸. In summing up the entire exhibition The Times concluded that this artist was 'too good to reach a wide popularity', but 'in a quiet room, hung by themselves on walls of sober colour', his paintings are '...the sort of things to sit down before; it is well to let them sink into one's consciousness, and to allow the quiet appeal of their vibrating light and shade and subtle colour, work in its own way.'⁹

For an Associate of the Royal Academy, someone recognized as the erstwhile leader of a revolt against its practices, Clausen had moved with the avant-garde and studied the way light envelopes a scene throwing out passages of pure colour, glowing in their intensity. Their iridescence was achieved by equal analytic intelligence applied to shadows and in the present instance, swiftly composed¹⁰. When called upon to address 'Theories of Representation' in later lectures Clausen confessed that he was 'in my small way, an impressionist' a movement that '...cleared our colour, has brought sunlight into our painting, and has gone some way towards driving out the poses of the professional model in favour of the study of natural movement.'¹¹

These words were published in 1912 when the matter – Impressionism and Modernism - was not yet settled, but they reflect a resumé of practice going back at least twenty years. Colour, light and natural movement may not have been declared in print in 1898 when the present work was painted, but they were there on canvas for all to see.

¹In 1902, the year in which the present work went on display, a correspondent of The Magazine of Art challenged Clausen on the accuracy of his observation of mowers and received a brisk response accompanied by a diagram. Clausen wrote, 'Your correspondent is wrong about my mowers. I have studied the action very carefully, and it is correct. Which leg appears to be forward depends not only on the point of view of the spectator, but on the moment of the action chosen ... as a matter of fact he stands with his feet well apart, and flat on the ground, evenly facing his work, and going forward with a little shuffling step at each stroke ... in my Mowers the moment chosen for the principal figure is the end of the stroke: the second figure is at the beginning of the stroke and has his right leg advanced'; The Magazine of Art 1902, p.279, quoted in Kenneth McConkey, George Clausen and the Picture of English Rural Life, 2012 (Atelier Books, Edinburgh), p. 222 (note 25).
²Mobile presses circulating around a village were brought into use – practices that persisted in Clausen's day. An important part of the rural economy, orchards might function if necessary, as readymade pens for sheep and chickens, and required little management until the fruiting season, when mowing was necessary.
³The Truck Act of 1887 forbade the payment of wages in cider.
⁴See for instance, McConkey 2012, p. 47.
⁵Clausen had originally tackled orchard scything in A Man scything in an Orchard, c, 1888, 30.5 x 45.7 cm, sold Christie's 13 July 2016.
⁶Originally the London branch of a French dealership, the firm had been managed by the painter's agent, David Croal Thomson, but when he left the company, five years before, its French owners withdrew from London in favour of William Marchant, leaving its name. This is important, because as the art market expanded in the early years of the twentieth century, for established artists like Clausen, solo exhibitions, unknown fifty years earlier, assumed much greater importance than annual academy exhibition-pieces.
⁷'London Picture Exhibitions', The Manchester Guardian, 3 November 1902, p. 12; 'London Correspondence', Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 3 November 1902, p. 4.
⁸'Studio Talk', The Studio, vol 27, November 1902, p. 207; AJF, 'Art Notes – An Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings by G Clausen ARA', The Morning Leader, 8 November 1902, p. 4.
⁹'Art Exhibitions', The Times, 1 November 1902, p. 8.
¹⁰In the present instance the figure is placed on a band of sunlit grass that cuts the bottom edge of the canvas, marking out the space, while framing the action.
¹¹George Clausen, RA, RWS, Royal Academy Lectures on Painting, 1912 (Methuen & Co), p. 334.


We are grateful to Professor Kenneth McConkey for compiling this catalogue entry.