George Clausen Biography

Sir George Clausen RA RWS RI ROI (1852-1944) was a British artist working in oil and watercolour, etching, mezzotint, drypoint and occasionally lithographs. He was knighted in 1927.

George Clausen was born at 8 William Street in the Regents Park district of London on 18 April 1852, the son of a decorative artist of Danish descent and a Scottish mother. From 1867 to 1873, he attended design classes at the South Kensington Schools in London with great success. He then worked in the studio of Edwin Long RA and subsequently in Paris under Bouguereau and Tony Robert-Fleury at the Académie Julian. He was an admirer of the naturalism of the painter Jules Bastien-Lepage about whom he wrote in 1888 and 1892.

Clausen became one of the foremost modern painters of landscape and of peasant life, influenced to a certain extent by the Impressionists, with whom he shared the view that light is the real subject of landscape art. His pictures excel in rendering the appearance of things under flecking outdoor sunlight, or in the shady shelter of a barn or stable.

Other landscapes included "The Fields in June" (1914) and "Midsummer Dawn" (1921). For the Imperial War Museum he painted the large, broadly decorative, "Gun Factory at Woolwich Arsenal" (1919). His decorative work also included "Renaissance" (1915) and decorations for the Hall at High Royd, Huddersfield, consisting of life-size figures in lunettes.

Clausen was a founding member of the New English Art Club in 1886. In 1895, he was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy, and a full Academician in 1906. He was elected as the Master of the Art Workers' Guild in 1909. As Professor of Painting at the Royal Academy he gave a memorable series of lectures to the students of the Schools, published as Six Lectures on Painting (1904) and Aims and Ideals in Art (1906).

Clausen was an official war artist during World War I. During the war his daughter's fiancé, Second Lieutenant Geraint Payne, was killed; this event may have inspired his painting, Youth Mourning which shows a distressed young woman mourning in a desolate landscape. Clausen also contributed six lithographs on the theme Making Guns for the Government published print portfolio Britain's Efforts and Ideals.

In 1921 Clausen was an original Society of Graphic Art member and showed his work in their first exhibition.

Clausen died at home in the village of Cold Ash in 1944 and was buried there next to his wife in the parish churchyard.