Summer sunlight, rural tranquility and the innocence of childhood are the hallmarks of the best work of George Clausen. His paintings of ploughboys, farmer’s daughters and his own children have the ruddy glow of outdoor life. They may now be regarded as nostalgic depictions of a lost agricultural age which was rapidly being altered by mechanization. However at the t.mes they were painted, these pictures were highly modern images of changing rural lives as un-employed workers were abandoning the countryside to seek work in the towns and cities. His pictures signify a quiet revolution that was underway in the countryside brought in by the new Education Acts of the 1880s. These laws demanded that children be educated at least to primary level and certainly improved the lives of rural poor children but also led to a deficit in children free to toil in the fields. There was a change in Clausen’s paintings that came about around the t.mes that new legislation sought to make the lives of the rural poor better. In the late 1880s Clausen painted a series of pictures of children working in the fields which at first seem to be quaint images of a bygone era in the countryside. On closer inspection they depict drudgery where children were expected to earn their keep by working from sunrise to sunset picking potatoes, leading plough-horses, tending flocks and gleaning. A Ploughboy painted in 1887 (sold in these rooms, 17 December 2015, lot 62) does not show an idealised country-boy, it depicts toil and grime, poverty and mal-nutrition. A young boy, probably around twelve years of age, has an expression that is not sent.mes ntalised – his eyes seem to speak of hardship. The skin of his face is weather-beaten and his finger-nails are dirty. He is dressed in oversized ‘hand-me-downs’, holed, frayed and wrapped tightly against the autumn cold. In case we were in any doubt that his purpose in life is to work in the soil, a plough-share is placed prominently in the composition as a symbol of the labour that he is bound to until the day he dies. Clausen’s was not interested in painting a prettified image of children playing in the fields such as Myles Birkett Foster or Helen Allingham painted – he painted uncompromising and somet.mes s raw Realism.

Clausen’s greatest pictures of this period The Stone Breakers of 1887 (Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle Upon Tyne), Planting a Tree of 1888 (sold in these rooms, 11 December 2007, lot 57), The Girl at the Gate (Tate) and Ploughing both of 1889 (Aberdeen Art Gallery) are essays on exhaustion and hard labour. Even a picture like Noon in the Hayfield painted in 1890 (sold in these rooms, 23 May 2103, lot 27) with its lush verdant greens and golds has another layer of meaning beneath the superficial beauty of the picture. This young girl is taking a moment to recover her strength before returning to work clearing weeds from an orchard. She is not smiling and her eyes are lost in far off reverie (of a better life perhaps?). This mood is also conveyed in Day Dreams (sold in these rooms, 11 December 2007, lot 54) where the younger woman is melancholically dreaming of love whilst her older companion is so exhausted by labour that she has fallen asleep, her callused hands fallen limply into her lap. But change was coming and there was some hope on the horizon for the hundreds of thousands of children born in the cramped labourer’s cottages all over the country. In 1880 compulsory education had been introduced, insisting that children attend school between the ages of five and ten. However many families could not afford to pay the fees and truancy was rife until 1891 when a change in the law meant that fees were no longer payable. In 1893 compulsory attendance was raised to twelve and also provision was made for deaf and blind children. It was not seen as positive by all and in 1884 Dewey Bates (one of Clausen’s biographers) wrote an article criticising the freedom granted to rural workers by their new access to education. He wrote; ‘The ploughman will be reclining under the hedge reading Homer and Virgil, while the market gardener’s flower women have taken up watercolour and his maid neglects his dinner while practicing Rubinstein and Chopin.’ (Dewey Bates, About the Market Gardens, 1884, p.555).

The present work depicts Rose Grimsdale who made her first appearance in The Schoolgirl of 1889 (private collects ion) when she was a pupil at the primary school in Cookham Dean. She had been born in Prestwood in Buckinghamshire in 1879, daughter of Abel and Emily Grimsdale, who moved to Cookham around 1889. Her father was a shepherd according to the 1891 census and her mother was a farm labourer. The family of thirteen children lived in a ‘two-up-two-down’ at 16 Hamfield Cottages on Lower Road in the centre of the village. She was the model for several pictures by Clausen (payment for her posing no doubt helping the meagre Grimsdale family finances). In the same year that she was painted as a schoolgirl Clausen also reminded us that she was still a child-labourer when he drew the large pastel Little Rose (Private collects ion) depicting her resting in the potato fields. She was also portrayed in Brown Eyes of 1891 (Tate), Head of a Young Girl of 1890 (Christie’s, 16 June 2010, lot 110, incorrectly dated 1896) and A Village Girl (Christie’s, 11 July 2013, lot 13).

It is likely that when Clausen moved to Essex in 1891, Rose Grimsdale completed her compulsory education and went back to work in the fields. Therefore the present picture depicts her last year as a schoolgirl and there is a touch of melancholy in her brown eyes. She is dressed in a simple worker’s smock rather than her school uniform. She is surrounded by the green of the fields – like the chalk drawing Head of a Young Girl (Rose Grimsdale) dated 1890 (Christie’s, 29 July 2020, lot 10). 1891 was also a pivotal year for the artist, as the Clausen family moved from Cookham to Widdington, a village near Saffron Walden, in the summer of that year. The present picture and the Tate’s Brown Eyes are Clausen’s last depictions of Rose who was replaced by a model named Emmy Wright who bore a striking resemblance to Rose, so that Clausen could continue the series of pictures of red-haired farm-girls. Portrait of a Child, Rose Grimsdale is recorded in Clausen’s account book on 28 April 1891 ‘took small head of Rose (on panel) to Goupil’s £26.5s’. The picture was sold by Goupil to Miss M. Kay but later in 1891 Clausen asked for the picture to be returned to him temporarily so that it could be exhibited at the winter exhibition at the New English Art Club as Portrait of a Child. It has not been seen publicly until now and apparently never reproduced - it is a welcome rediscovery of an example of Clausen's most engaging work, the fleeting beauty of youth, light and seasons.