Sir George Clausen, RA, RWS

(British, 1852-1944)

Portrait of a Young Woman, thought to represent Lily Pitman

Footnotes

Provenance
Mr & Mrs John Downing, Cropthorne, Worcestershire.
To George Arthur Latham, 1942.
By descent to the present owner.
Private collection, UK.


Although undocumented in the artist's accounts, the early lineage of the present portrait places it in the collection of Mr & Mrs John and Lily Downing. Lily Downing, née Pitman, was the cousin of Agnes Mary Clausen, the artist's wife. Born in 1866, she is likely to have been around thirty when the portrait was painted and this, on technical grounds, supported by the style of the signature, the dress and hair style, would suggest that the present canvas must date c. 1895-1900, with every likelihood that Lily is the model. It comes from a point in Clausen's career when, although interested in head studies of local fieldworkers in and around Widdington, the Essex village where he lived, he was not receiving portrait commissions¹. The search for conclusive documentary evidence on the identity of the sitter continues²

One other portrait is relevant in this regard – that of Margaret Hilton Smith aged 15 (Bristol Museum and Art Gallery), the daughter of Clausen's doctor at Widdington, W. A. Smith. Miss Smith's was a portrait in which the painter bows to convention³. While the children who surrounded him wore work-a-day clothes, this girl, clad in white with a blue satin cummerbund, could aspire to a place in society - and one 'on the line' at the Royal Academy. Although newly elected an Academy Associate, Clausen did not believe that this was his forte. He could never aspire to the 'aesthetic' and oriental accoutrements that accompany the young woman in James Jebusa Shannon's Reverie, 1898 (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool), for instance, and even though his sitter in the present portrait, wears a similar dress trimmed at the neck with a white fichu, she requires no such props to support her personality.

At once more intimiste than Miss Smith and with none of the pretentions of Shannon, the present portrait nevertheless possesses considerable appeal. Unfinished in places, perhaps, its immediacy draws the spectator. A 'lick' of Hookers green in the right cuff draws the eye to the subtle modelling of the face. Elsewhere we note an arm barely indicated, and a hand unresolved, but both so spontaneous that they carry the sense of a living presence - and while we struggle to confirm her name, Clausen's young woman retains her air of mystery. Whistler criticised his Academy contemporaries for wishing to make their sitters 'stand out' from their frames – when in fact the portrait's subject 'should stand within (his emphasis) the frame and at a depth behind it equal to the distance at which the painter sees his model'⁴. This reticent and unassuming young woman who sits for the painter exercises considerable power from 'within the frame'.

¹For obvious reasons a successful portrait painter in the 1890s required a London or Edinburgh address.
²The subject of ongoing research, an extensive survey of Clausen's records, including drawings collections in Bath, Bristol, Plymouth, the Royal Academy and family collections has so far failed to find conclusive evidence confirming the proposed identity of the sitter, which relies on the picture's provenance. The present owner has however, established that his great grandfather, George Arthur Latham, purchased the picture along with the School House at Cropthorne at Worcestershire in 1942 from John Downing. If Agnes Mary Clausen's cousin was not a regular visitor to the Clausen home in Essex it may also explain the lack of resolution in some parts of the composition.
³A second, and most unusual oval portrait of Miss Smith, of the same date as that in Bristol, is in the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle Upon Tyne.
⁴'Mr Whistler: Proposition No 2 Academie Carmen', quoted from A Catalogue of the Pictures, Drawings, Prints and Sculpture at the Third Exhibition of the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers, pp. 11-12.

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