Sir George Clausen, RA, RWS

(British, 1852-1944)

Sorting the catch, Volendam

Footnotes

Provenance
With Peter Hirsch, Brighton, by late 1960s.
Private collection, UK.
Property of a deceased's estate.

In the late nineteenth century, women lined the quays as Dutch herring boats returned one-by-one to harbour. Sorting nature's bounty, a scene of cheerful industry, was a task that must be completed in these devout communities before Sunday church services. Like the English fishing ports, Volendam, in the Zuider Zee, was essentially off the tourist trail and did not merit a mention in early Baedeker guides to Holland¹. Women crouching over creels were not especially picturesque, and their aesthetic appeal in the contemporary post-Pre-Raphaelite London art world was marginal at best. The emerging artist who studied them, had been 'deeply bitten', in the opinion of one critic, by a 'dismal Dutch mania'². In this young artist's case the subject matter ran so deep that George Clausen was already thought to be Dutch and when he showed High Mass at a Fishing Village on the Zuyder Zee (Fig. 1) - Tom Taylor writing in The Times, for instance, declared this 'a mature work' by a 'very clever Dutch painter' who had taken up residence in London³.

Clausen was in fact a native Londoner aged twenty-four, whose father hailed from Jutland, while his mother was from Aberdeen. Nevertheless, the successful sale of High Mass ... at the Royal Academy in 1876 suggested that he return to the Volendam Haven in the following years - where he stayed at the inn run by the eponymous Leendert Spaander, that would eventually become popular with artists⁴ (Fig. 2).

Clausen was thus within walking distance of the weekly labours of the women in the present work. For him they provided a picture that would complement and indeed, outstrip High Mass ... The boats could be shown, arriving in strict sequence to the long line of kneeling women and children – reverence for the fruits of the sea being almost Biblical. He immediately set to work with his sketchbook, started making oil studies of figures and the dilapidated cottages in which they lived, as well as sketches of the approaching fleet, all of which would inform his great new painting⁵: see for example Study of a Dutch woman gutting fish in a creel (Volendam), circa 1875-8, Study of wooden houses (Holland), circa 1875-8, and Study of sailing boats on the Sea circa 1875-8 (all Royal Academy of Arts collection, London). Until now, the existence of the present work has remained unknown⁶.

At the start of these regular returns to the source of his inspiration, the young artist obtained vital support from his generous employer, Edwin Longsden Long, the painter of popular ancient Assyrian and Biblical subjects⁷. The assistant's unacknowledged role in this success, meant going off to the British Museum to draw artefacts that might be useful as architectural and dress ornaments in Long's pictures⁸. Of more interest to the young Clausen were visits to the dealer Charles Deschamps, Durand-Ruel's London manager who was selling works by Impressionist, Barbizon and Hague School painters. The contemporary artists he admired were those from Deschamps' stock, and those painters of rural life such as Léon Lhermitte and Alphonse Legros, who were regular London exhibitors⁹.

Arriving in Volendam on the Zuider Zee, conducting his studies in the open air for a work in the Legros/Lhermitte idiom quickly identified Clausen as a radical¹⁰. And as they accumulated, there was strength in depth. Hats, clogs, voluminous trousers and other aspects of dress, regarded as picturesque, were unique to each village. The women's Volendam cap, for instance, was characterized by starched 'cornettes', or 'ears', as in the present work, and differed from those in other fishing villages. It was never removed in public. From these notes, Sorting the Catch, Volendam, derives - a scene in which an elderly fisherman delivers a new basket of fish to waiting women and children, while a young mother, babe in arms, framing the composition on the left, passes by. Unified by the fall of sunlight, each figure is studied in detail. As clouds gather on the horizon, more craft will soon arrive, laden with the sea's harvest. In this formidable frieze of working women, a young painter places himself in the centre of the most progressive painting of the late 1870s in Britain.


¹Omitted in 1881, Volendam was only mentioned in passing in later editions – see for instance, Karl Baedeker, Belgium and Holland, Baedeker, Leipzig, 1910, pp. 408-9. Its economy, depending on herring shoals, was augmented by the harvesting of shellfish.
²Review of 'The Institute of Painters in Watercolours', The Morning Post, 30 April 1877, p.2.
³'The Royal Academy', The Times, 22 May 1876, p. 6; quoted in McConkey 2012, pp. 23-4.
⁴Monet reputedly had visited the hostelry while en route from Britain to France following the Franco-Prussian War, and in the years following Clausen's visits, numerous British and American artists billeted at the Spaander, including Mortimer Menpes, Stanhope Forbes, Walter Langley, Adrian Stokes, William Henry Bartlett and Lee Hankey. The American contingent included William Merritt Chase, Gary Melchers and Elizabeth Nourse. On 22 December 1936, when researching the early days of the inn, Spaander's son wrote to Clausen for his reminiscences recalling High Mass at a Fishing Village on the Zuyder Zee(Royal Academy Collection).
⁵Clausen's sketchbook for this period (Victoria & Albert Museum, E.1928-1946, unphotographed) contains many drawings related to the present work.
⁶While the discovery of more ambitious Clausen oil paintings is rare, the fact that there is no apparent exhibition record is unusual in this instance and suggests that Sorting the Catch, Volendam was purchased directly from the artist or may have been the result of a commission.
⁷Long, an Associate of the Royal Academy, who had made his reputation with Spanish genre and history subjects was now expanding his range with Biblical and scenes of ancient Assyria, for which he sought Clausen's assistance - see for instance the celebrated Babylonian Marriage Market of 1875 (Royal Holloway College, Egham, Surrey), discussed in Imogen Hart, 'The Politics of Possession: Edwin Long's Babylonian Marriage Market.' Art History vol 35, no. 1, 2012, pp. 87-105; see also Mark Bills, Edwin Longsden Long RA, Cynus Arts, 1998 pp. 105-8.
⁸Kenneth McConkey, George Clausen and the picture of English rural Life, Atelier Books, Edinburgh, 2012, pp. 19-28. In return for these details the busy painter advised his assistant to study Spanish art, as he had done, and presented him with his copy of Velázquez' The Spinners, made in the Prado, almost twenty years earlier; see Bills 1998, p. 101 (no 132). Long is likely to have recommended Clausen to copy Velázquez' Philip IV (Philip Old), in the National Gallery (McConkey 2012, p. 22, fig 16).
⁹In Paris for the Salon of 1875, the young Clausen is likely to have found, Lhermitte's Pélerinage à la vierge du pilier (Trinity College, Montreal) of great interest. Legros, appointed Principal of the Slade School of Fine Art in 1876, had been also exhibiting devotional scenes of contemporary Boulonnais fisherfolk and Clausen would have seen canvases like Blessing the Sea, (Museums Sheffield) shown at the Royal Academy in 1873.
¹⁰See for instance, Harry Quilter, Preferences in Art, Life and Literature, Swan, Sonnenshein & Co, 1892, p. 323.

We are grateful to Professor Kenneth McConkey for compiling this catalogue entry.


Fig 1.George Clausen, High Mass at a Fishing Village on the Zuyder Zee, 1875-6, Nottingham City Museums and Galleries
Fig 2. George Clausen, Leendert Spaander, 1878, Zuiderzeemuseum, Holland.