'It is impossible to draw the line and say where realism ends and impressionism begins,' wrote George Clausen (1852–1944). The two styles were so intertwined in his work, which was pivotal to the British rural naturalist movement. Best known for his realistic paintings of rural workers characterised by an abundance of nature and a rich and earthy colour palette, such as The Girl at the Gate, he also produced drawings with an immediate, intimate and sensitive quality well worth exploring.

Born in London, Clausen was the son of a Danish decorative artist. He trained at the South Kensington Schools with English artist Edwin Long, but found Long's 'orientalist' work unappealing. Visits to northern Europe led Clausen to produce works reminiscent of Dutch and Flemish genre scenes in the 1870s. Critics mistook his first exhibit at the Royal Academy for the work of 'a very clever Dutch painter.'

High Mass at a Fishing Village on the Zuyder Zee, Holland

In 1883, Clausen studied at the Académie Julian in Paris and found inspiration in French Realist art. Clausen saw 'the beauty and significance of ordinary occupations, the union of man with nature, and the dependence of man on nature,' in Jean-François Millet's work. Clausen was struck, too, by the pervasive naturalism and photorealism of Jules Bastien-Lepage.

The nineteenth-century European artistic movement called Naturalism prioritised the representation of things more realistically, rather than idealised according to classical conventions. Artists had long sketched outdoors, but Naturalist artists placed more importance on so-called plein air practice – the drawing and painting of landscapes and figures from life outdoors.

French Realists, such as Gustave Courbet and Millet, provided the most immediate precedent for the British rural naturalists like Clausen. They shared an impetus to represent the manners, customs and occupations of people in particular regions and the light and colour of nature found there.

'It was not a question of subject, but of seeing: that anything could be seen as a picture, at its moment,' explained Clausen. 'It was all wrong to go on painting dressed-up models.' He moved his family to the country where 'you could see people doing simple things under good conditions of lighting.'

Clausen was a true ruralist, devoted to depicting the outlying countryside environment, agriculture and the everyday activities of rural workers without need for narrative. His art reflects the complex English rural scene of his time.

From the 1880s, rural depression caused countryside populations to decrease as workers emigrated to urban factories. Meanwhile, upper-middle-class entrepreneurs, many of whose fortunes were linked to agriculture, moved to the countryside seeking escape from urban overpopulation and became patrons of rural naturalist art.

Alongside the sale of paintings, Clausen made a steady income by marketing his drawings to such patrons. His drawings reveal his dedication to realism, light effects and the expression of moments in time, his technical range and methods of studying his subjects outdoors.

To Clausen, the most important type of realism was 'realism of expression or character,' not of 'surface appearances.' He paid concerted attention to the facial expressions and body language of individual rural workers. He recognised that real agricultural labour was the 'hard, constant and exacting' kind seen in Millet's serious representations of peasants, not the refined idealised kind seen in the work of French academic artist William-Adolphe Bouguereau.

In a drawing of one of his first exhibited peasant-themed works, Gleaners (1882), produced for the Grosvenor Gallery catalogue, Clausen let details of the natural world, devotedly rendered in his paintings, remain vague. He was still careful to convey the expressions and tiresome poses of the field workers.

Study for Going Home (1884), a simple charcoal sketch of a middle-aged man walking with a young boy, evokes the ages of man.

Meanwhile, the effects of ageing, and perhaps its acceleration by labour and poverty, are apparent in Head of an Old Peasant Woman (undated) – an older, thinner-faced figure than that of his well-known painting Woman of the Fields (1883, private collection).

The realism and solidity of the figure in this close-cropped drawing and Head of a Boy (1897) are testament to the artist's skill in portraiture – another genre in which he had commercial success.

Intrigued by the work of Newlyn School artists, such as Walter Langley, Clausen engaged briefly with imagery of fisherfolk. Compositional Study for 'Fisher Girls on the Beach' (1880) is a complex composition attuned to the mood and atmosphere of the seascape and human feeling.

Compositional Study for 'Fisher Girls on the Beach'

Here, buff paper lends itself to the evocation of sunlit sand. The procession of figures, rendered in black chalk, appears as merged silhouettes, suggestive of the closeness of the fisher community while their hats, highlighted with white chalk, demarcate individual figures. The finished painting is in The Higgins Bedford.

Meanwhile, in his close-cropped drawing for two of the fisherfolk, Girl and Baby, the soft application of charcoal on paper with curving lines and smudging conveys genuine sentiment in the moment between the smiling baby and the expressionless girl whose energy is focused on carrying it.

In 1886, Clausen co-founded the New English Art Club (NEAC) with other young British artists returning from France and breaking away from traditional genre painting. It was an exhibition society where realist and impressionistic styles were well-represented. By 1889, Clausen had found such success that his painting Girl at the Gate was purchased for the national collection.

Following his move to Widdington, Essex, in 1891, he further developed his approach to light and atmosphere. He shared the Impressionists' view that light is the real subject of landscape art. This belief is as apparent in his drawings as it is in his paintings, sometimes more so. He declared that 'drawing is the intellectual side of art' and 'colour is the emotional side' (but acknowledged that is 'not a hard and fast rule.')

His drawings in monochrome media convey a strong sense of feeling and mood. He believed the best landscape artists 'presented nature… as records of her moods.' His graphite drawing on paper, The Reapers (1896), a study that updates the theme of his painting Mowers (1891), epitomises his desire to convey atmosphere and light, and his penchant for sunrise and sunset.

'Everything in nature is moving,' Clausen claimed, adding that 'this sense of life and movement must be given in a picture.' He would later teach this attitude as Professor at the Royal Academy of Arts School (1904–1906). His closely cropped study Man and Scythe (1897) focuses on the man's grip on the handles of the tool, while his stooped back suggests the action of harvesting a crop. The patch of white across his right shoulder and down his back indicates the heat of the summer sun.

Clausen depicted numerous barn scenes that are indebted to nativity scenes by Old Masters such as Rembrandt. Interior of a Barn, drawn in charcoal on brown paper, evokes the warmth of summertime.

This is enhanced with contrasting light effects: a wash that produces soft shadows and white highlights that indicate daylight entering the space.

In the early twentieth century, Clausen moved back to London, but continued to visit Essex to study rural subjects, such as Gap in the Hedge (1900).

Study of the Boy for 'The Gap in the Hedge'

Clausen added 'simple tints' of colour to some drawings, declaring 'colour has an effect in echoing or waking our feelings that drawing alone has not.' At the Académie Julian, he had begun to emulate Millet's practice of drawing with coloured pastels. In A Group of Trees (Home in Wood) he applied watercolour over pen and ink.

The brown tint of the trees in the foreground gives heat to the shade while the pale yellow of the lane shows it to be flooded with sunlight. The blue roofs of the farm buildings suggest refreshing patches of shade.

In Man Honing a Scythe (1897), he utilised coloured crayon, creating a sense of warm light on earth-stained fabrics. His recording of colour in preparatory drawings helped him to produce paintings with vibrant effects of mood and atmosphere.

Clausen's rural naturalist drawings provide a valuable record of a way of life – of simple agricultural methods involving human labour – that was entirely changed as the twentieth century progressed. He influenced the next generation of artists interested in depicting the lives of people in rural corners of the world, particularly his student, the folklorist Estella Canziani and his friend Annie Swynnerton.

As a war artist, he made lithographs of labourers in heavy weaponry factories characterised by dramatic light effects. In the 1920s, from his country retreat, he depicted less peopled atmospheric landscapes and striking twilight forge scenes. His unique contribution to British art was recognised by his election as a full Member of the Royal Academy in 1906 and knighthood in 1927.

Katie J. T. Herrington, art historian and curator

This content was funded by the Bridget Riley Art Foundation

Further reading

George Clausen, 'Jules Bastien-Lepage as Artist' in André Theuriet, Jules Bastien-Lepage and his art: a memoir, T. Fisher Unwin, 1892

George Clausen, Six Lectures on Painting: Delivered to the Students of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, 2nd ed., Methuen, 1906

Adrian Hill, On Drawing and Painting Trees, Sir Issac Pitman & Sons Ltd, 1936

Kristi Holden, 'George Clausen and Henry Herbert La Thangue: rural painting, urban patronage', in The Other Nineteenth Century Painters, Critics and Salons special issue of Apollo: The International Magazine of the Arts, vol. 149, 1999, pp.11–19

Kenneth McConkey (ed.), Clausen in Essex: Sir George Clausen RA, 1852–1944, Duncan Willoughby, 2002

Kenneth McConkey, 'The Bouguereau of the Naturalists: Bastien Lepage and British Art', in Art History, I/3, 1978, pp.371–382

Kenneth McConkey, George Clausen and the Picture of English Rural Life, Newcastle upon Tyne Polytechnic Art Gallery: Atelier Books, 2012

Kenneth McConkey, Peasantries: 19th-century French and British Pictures of Peasants and Field Workers, Peter Pan Books, 1981

Kenneth McConkey, 'Rustic Naturalism in Britain' in Gabriel P. Weisberg, European Realist Tradition, Indiana University Press, 1982, pp.215–228

Kenneth McConkey, Sir George Clausen, R.A. 1852–1944, exhibition catalogue, Cartwright Hall, Tyne and Wear County Council Museums, 1980

Anna Gruetzner Robins, 'Living the simple life: George Clausen at Childwick Green, St Albans' in David Peters Corbett, Ysanne Holt and Fiona Russell, The Geographies of Englishness: Landscape and the National Past, 1880–1940, Yale University Press, 2002

Peyton Skipwith, 'Sir George Clausen' in Connoisseur, CCIV/821, 1980, pp.180–185