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Exhibited: London, Royal Academy, 1900, no.291.
London, Franco-British Exhibition, 1908, no.137.
London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Twenty Years of British Art 1890-1910, 1910, no.529.
Manchester, City Art Gallery, Autumn Exhibition, 1910, no.121.
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Literature: F. Rinder, 'The Royal Academy', Art Journal, 1900, p.174.
'The Royal Academy - Second Notice', Athenaeum, 12 May 1900, p.597.
D.S. MacColl, 'The Academy II - The Poor Man's Tea', Saturday Review, 19 May 1900, p.614.
Royal Academy Pictures, 1900, p.17.
Sir Isidore Spielmann (compiler), Souvenir of the Fine Art section, Franco-British Exhibition, 1908 (under the auspices of the British Art committee), following p.140, illustrated.
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Notes: In 1897 when he exhibited The Old Barn (fig.1) in the Royal Academy, George Clausen arrived at what was to be the source of major works from 1900 onwards. From 1884, barn interiors featured in his sketchbooks and throughout the following decade he painted studies of men threshing and winnowing, but this was the first important canvas to fully engage the theatrical context of these activities. Showing two labourers filling sacks of grain to be taken to the local mill, this canvas conveyed Clausen's knowledge of the work of French rustic naturalist painters such as Jean-François Millet and Jules Bastien-Lepage. However the ancient barns which stood around his home at Bishop's Farm, Widdington, near Newport in Essex provided a unique environment.
Barns were built for the processing and storing of cereal crops, all of which were grown in the surrounding area. The exact dates of origin of these ancient structures remain unknown. Not mentioned in the Domesday Book, many of them pre-date the Norman Conquest. At this time the manor of Widdington was ceded to the abbey of St Valery-sur-Somme by William the Conqueror in gratitude for its support in his campaign. Monks from the abbey settled on this new estate and by the mid-fourteenth century the largest of the medieval barns known as Prior's Hall Barn (fig. 2) was in operation, a short distance from Clausen's house. 2 Its ownership passed to the Bishop of Winchester during the Hundred Years War and thence to New College, Oxford, which he founded. From the mid-fifteenth century it remained in college ownership until 1920. This barn is of similar construction to that in the present work except that interior divisions have subsequently been removed. Along with others of similar date, it remained in use well into the twentieth century, although by that time the hand-processing of grain using flails and winnowing fans had ceased.
For Clausen, the painting of 1897 was merely an introduction to what would became one of his signature themes. In the present picture, the second and arguably more impressive example, the labourers are operating a hand-cranked sifting machine - the final stage in a process which began with the skilled and dangerous job of flailing. The grain left on the threshing floor after flailing, was then winnowed to remove the husks, before the sifting and sacking which we see here. This labour-intensive process which followed the harvest was overhauled by the introduction of steam-powered threshing machines which worked in the rickyards 3. Critics generally approved this new departure in Clausen's work. The painter of the Essex fields had found an indoor theme which for DS MacColl, writing in The Saturday Review, 'throbs with close observation in all its dusty tones' 4. For The Art Journal, the present picture was 'more subtle - on the whole more delightful' than his other Academy exhibits such as A Gap in the Hedge (Leeds City Art Gallery) 5. Its critic noted that, 'Little light penetrates into this rickety timbered structure, where figures are at work, and it is in the partial diffusion of this light, the partial illumination of the barn, that Mr Clausen triumphs'. 6 Even the normally hostile Athenaeum grudgingly conceded that in 'the men at work in the shadowy barn that is dashed with sunlight, there are... proofs enough of powers which might be more profitably employed than in... a threadbare theme'. 7
Clausen's theme was however far from 'threadbare'. At the time the current conditions of rural life were hotly debated, along with the fact that only a quarter of annual British grain consumption was home-produced. The importation of cheap corn from the North American prairies during the bad harvests of the 1870's began the long, slow decline of British agriculture. 8 It continued as the population drift to the cities in the wake of industrialization gathered pace. By painting rural life, artists like Clausen, Henry La Thangue, Edward Stott and others were generally focussing attention on a massive social change and its attendant problems. Rider Haggard tackled this sensitive topic when he asked 'how is it proposed to safeguard the country from starvation in the event of a hostile combination of European nations against us?' 9 These fears, voiced in 1898 and 1899, increased with the Spanish-American War, the Fashoda Incident, when Britain and France came close to war control of Egypt and the Sudan, and with the outbreak of the Boer War.
Although not expicitly stated, Clausen accepted the moral imperatives of the 'back to the land' movement of the 1890's, and the barn became his spatial theatre. The ancient science in its construction meant that huge double doors faced each other to permit a through-draught which would blow away the chaff during winnowing. 1 0 The exhibition of The Dark Barn coincided with the Relief of Mafeking and public jubilation in the streets of London. British values, industry, knowledge and tradition, had triumphed once more.
The old winnowing process depicted by Millet was now appropriated to become the subject of The Golden Barn, (fig. 3), a work which was highly praised for its harmonious blend of 'the poetry that issues from form and colour'. 1 1 In the Barn, 1902 (Leeds City Art Galleries) which shows a man with a flail, illustrates the first stage, while The Barn Door, 1904 (fig 4), when the big sacks are being loaded onto a wagon, the last. Later variants on the theme include An Ancient Barn, 1908 (Centre for British Art, Yale University, New Haven), Clausen's Academy Diploma picture, Interior of an Old Barn, 1908 (Royal Academy of Arts) and in The Barn Door at Deer's Farm, 1911 (sold Christie's 23 November 1993, lot 20). He conflated the whole activity into two etchings, Dressing Wheat and Filling Sacks, both of which were shown at the Academy in 1912. 1 2
Clausen lived at Widdington for 15 years and he departed reluctantly in 1905 after his appointment as Professor of Painting at the Royal Academy Schools. He remained a trusted observer of rural life and enjoyed unrestricted access on his regular return visits to Essex. Many barns were in a dilapidated condition by the turn of the century, their rotting thatch admitting pools of sunlight which fell on the golden grain. In The Dark Barn and The Golden Barn, heaps of grain, the source of 'our daily bread', assume symbolic significance. In a Christian society, Clausen's imagery provided an unintended counterpoint to great Victorian hymns in which 'God's almighty hand' brings 'warmth to swell the grain'. The social consequence of works like The Dark Barn cannot therefore be under-estimated. Although religious themes never appealed to Clausen, he greatly admired Rembrandt's Adoration of the Shepherds (fig. 5) because it represented a section of an interior - similar to his Essex barns.
In front of the picture, he declared that the Dutch master seemed to take 'his suggestion from some very ordinary scene, and to carry it on in his mind and make it significant'. The idea for the painting came from the interesting light and shade in 'something he happened to see in a stable'. 1 3 Whether or not this was true for Rembrandt, it was certainly true for Clausen - for although the men were thoroughly studied, they carried on their primitive task in the shadows and what must have seemed a 'very ordinary scene', became one of immense social and cultural significance.
KMc
1 Charles Thomas Harris JP, who lived at 109 Denmark Hill, in South London, was a keen Clausen collector who at the time of his death owned eight oil paintings and five drawings by the artist. Of his eight pictures five were either Academy pieces or equivalents and could be regarded as important works. Of these five, three are in public collections, The Sheperdess, 1885 (National Museums on Merseyside, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool), Dusk, 1903 (Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne) and Building the Rick, 1908 (Birmingham Art Gallery). Only An Autumn Morning: Ploughing (RA 1897) and the present lot remain in private hands. In addition to works by Clausen, Harris owned Cooke, William Logsdail, and two works now likely to be considered 'school of Caneletto'. In pictures of English rural life, Clausen's only competitor was his fellow academician, Edward Stott, with seven pictures and one pastel. After his death, Harris's collection was sold at Christie's 27-28 November 1913, and the proceeds donated to Kings College Removal Fund.
2 David Sherlock BA, FSA, Prior's Hall Barn, Widdington, Essex, 1991 (English Heritage), pp.12-14.
3 These were in common use in Clausen's day, their only restriction being adverse weather conditions.
4 DSM (DS MacColl), 'The Academy II' - The Poor Man's Tea', The Saturday Review, 19 May 1900, p. 614.
5 Clausen's other important exhibit of 1900, Making a Rick, remains untraced.
6 'The Royal Academy', Art Journal, 1900, p.174.
7 'The Royal Academy - Second Notice', Athenaeum, 12 May 1900, p.597.
8 Howard Newby, Country Life, A Social History of Rural England, 1987 (Cardinal paperwork ed. 1988), pp.120-137.
9 H. Rider Haggard, The Farmer's Year, Being his Commonplace Book for 1898, 1899 (Cresset Library ed., 1987), p.333.
10 Charles Knightly, Country Voices, Life and Lore in Farm and Village, 1984 (Thames and Hudson), p.130-1. See also Duncan Willoughby and Leonard Overy-Owen, Clausen in Essex, 2002 (privately printed).
11 For further reference see Kenneth McConkey, Sir George Clausen RA, RWS, 1852-1944, 1980, (exhibition catalogue, Tyne and Wear and Bradford Museums), pp.72-5. A smaller version of this work is contained in Rochdale Art Gallery.
12 McConkey, 1980, p.88. Although he painted one or two barn interiors in the inter-war period, this phase of Clausen's work essentially closed with the Great War.
13 George Clausen, Royal Academy Lectures on Painting, 1913, (Methuen and Co), p.83.
KMc
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