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signed and dated G. Clausen. 1895. (lower left) oil on canvas 32 1/2 by 66in. 82.6 by 167.6cm. From the mid-1880s, George Clausen was fascinated by the labor of harvesting. He observed mowers and reapers in great detail, learning their actions by heart: reapers moved in unison across the field, collecting the grain which had fallen before the scythe, gathering it in `sheaves' and standing the sheaves in 'stooks' to dry for a short time in the sun before the later process of flailing and winnowing. This activity was strenuous, and had to be carried our systematically. English farming in the Essex countryside where Clausen lived in the mid-1890s remained labor-intensive, despite the challenge posed by the importation of cheap grain produced in a more automated way in the United States. In representing these scenes, Clausen was valorizing a way of life which was increasingly under threat. There were practical and aesthetic difficulties contained in the subject matter. Clausen's most important precedents came from France, from the work of Jean-Francois Millet and his followers. He was an early convert to the rural naturalism of artists such as Jules Bastien-Lepage and Leon Lhermitte, but he also recognized some of the limitations of the methods of the naturalist - particularly in portraying figures in motion. His began to move away from the naturalist dogma, concentrating on the interpretation of movement, rather than the portrayal of the frozen instant. The interest in atmospherics is evident in such works as Evening Song (private collection) and the widely praised Turning the Plough, 1894 (location unknown), shown at the Royal Academy exhibitions of 1893 and 1894. With such pictures, Clausen was moving closer to Millet. He adopted horizontal double square formats which lent themselves to wide, open landscapes with disused harrows or ploughs in the foreground, and groups of harvesters moving parallel to the picture plane. Clausen's oil technique, reminiscent of pastel