George ClausenSunset

Signed 'G. CLAUSEN' at lower right.

PROVENANCE
With The Fine Art Society, London, May 1985. 

Private Collection, London.

EXHIBITED
The Fine Art Society, George Clausen: The Rustic Image, London, 2012 [cat.47, col. ill.p.80 and back cover].

When Clausen's retrospective exhibition was staged at Barbizon House, London, the seventy-six year old painter was hailed as the great poet 'who knows how to stir one's imagination' with pictures of rural England that, 'make the town-dweller dream of dewy meadows shady lanes of the solemn grandeur of sunset, the blitheness of spring and the melancholy of a misty autumn morning.' (P.G. Konody in McConkey, George Clausen, 2012, p. 191).

These moods of nature were recorded on Duton Hill in Essex where the painter had his country retreat. From here the terrain gently undulates westwards towards the neighbouring villages of Broxted and Clavering.

Clausen would often be at work on this motif at dawn or dusk, either to watch the sun rise or fall. In the present instance, evening casts the landscape of blues and ochres into simple tonal transitions that are heightened by the blazing orb of the sun, hovering above the horizon.