Alon Zakaim Fine Art

The son of a Danish painter, Sir George Clausen was born in London in 1852. In 1867 Clausen began evening classes at the National Art School in South Kensington, now the Royal College of Art. He studied there under painter Edwin Long and it was Long who convinced Clausen to pursue art as a full time career.

Clausen studied at the South Kensington School of Art between 1873 and 1875 before visiting Belgium and Holland in 1875-76. Influenced initially by Dutch painting and Whistler during the 1870s, his style became closer to that of Jules Bastien-Lepage in the early 1880s. He married in 1881 and moved to Berkshire where the surrounding country provided the artist with rural scenes for his work. In 1882 he left for France where he studied briefly at the Académie Julien, Paris and while there, visited the studios of French salon painters, including Carolus-Duran. When he returned to England, he formed the New English Art Club in 1886 which adhered to the French plein-air style of painting.

Although successful with this style of painting, he began to experiment with pastel, and became more interested in capturing the effects of light, producing more impressionistic images of peasants. Many artists, noteably those at Newlyn, grew tired of painting out of doors, enduring all weathers, and instead built glasshouses in which to paint.

During the 1890s, Clausen became increasingly aware of the limitation of rustic naturalism. Influenced by the French Impressionists, he developed a more fluent style, showing a renewed interest in figural expression and movement, and a preoccupation with the play of sunlight and shade. Closely identifying with English rural life, he favoured naturalism during this period as a technique of what he called 'studied impartiality' with its emphasis on literal representation rather than narrative content.

In 1893 Clausen was awarded an honorary membership in the Art Workers Guild and he was elected ARA in 1895 and RA in 1908. From 1903-6 he was appointed to the position of Professor of Painting at the Royal Academy. During World War I he served as an official war artist, and was knighted in 1927. Sir George Clausen died in 1944.