ADAM'S Country House Collections Day II - 14th October 2025

100 For George Clausen and the artists of his generation, daily familiarity with the places and people from which their art was made, was an essential pre- requisite. For the most radical, those inspired by recent French painting, people were not types, but individuals, and their habitat, actual, not imagined. Thus, a little girl - one, Nellie Burr - appears at an old wooden gate with a rusty hinge, and waits to enter. A certain shyness might be normal for one of her tender age, and from the few clues we are given, the little portal at which she stands, could be that of a kitchen garden plot encircling a cottage deep in the countryside. Although unchanged since it was painted around 1893, the present work has a chequered history of mistitling and mistaken identity. When consigned to auction in 1959 it was entitled, A Fair Child. The suggestion that it represented the artist’s daughter, Katherine Frances, (aka Kit, or Kitty, 1886-1936), was made when it reappeared in Sotheby’s in 1992 and at that point it was entitled A Cottage Girl and was thought to have been shown at the Royal Academy. These suppositions, along with the 1959 title and the identification of the model, are all incorrect . 2 Detailed research in the artist’s account book for the early 1890s reveals a list of pictures currently in the artist’s studio on 20 October 1895, one of which, ‘Little Child (Nellie Burr)’ is described as ‘pochade’ and listed as ‘taken away by T’. 3 ‘ T’ here refers to David Croal Thomson (1855-1930), manager of the Goupil Gallery, London, the artist’s agent and a personal friend. The work was then entered in the Goupil Stockbook on 23 October 1895 as ‘Nellie’, with a purchaser’s name given as ‘Young’. 4 On technical grounds the work can be placed in the middle of a crucial period in the Clausen oeuvre, when he moved away from the strict Naturalism of the 1880s exemplified in The Girl at the Gate 1889 (fig 1) to a more Impressionistic handling. This development was hailed by critics, especially George Moore, when, in 1892, The Mowers , (fig 2) was exhibited. It was described as a canvas that ‘exhales a deep sensation of life’, revealing that the artist had ‘shaken himself free of his early training’. 5 Novelist and leading proponent of the new movement in art, the Irish writer, from his own direct experience as an art student in Paris, had been sharply critical of young painters of the 1880s who had adopted the ‘Modern Realism’ or ‘Naturalism’ of Jules Bastien-Lepage. While Clausen had applied ‘some native originality’ to this mantra, as the most important artist of this generation - admired by Osborne and Lavery, as well as the painters of the Glasgow School and the New English Art Club – at the point when The Girl at the Gate achieved acceptance, he was prepared to ditch the dogma. 6 The realisation that sharp naturalistic painting had reached a dead end, coincided with a house move from Berkshire to Essex. Here the discovery of new models and a new landscape led to a new more experimental handling. Nellie Burr’s face uniquely appears in this experimental phase. . The changes in handling did not mean the rejection of rural life. From Clausen’s early days in Hertfordshire head studies of farm workers, young and old, male and female, had been a favourite subject. 7 Much public debate centred around the education and welfare of children at a time of great social upheaval in Britain, with the flight from the land to cities. As in Ireland, tenants were being removed and farms acquired for sporting estates by the nouveaux riches . 8 Comparisons were regularly made between those red-faced ‘bonny’ children who lived in the fresh air and their less healthy counter- parts who grew up in industrial towns. Few paintings can express this more clearly than Nellie . But unlike other simple head studies of boys and girls, Nellie Burr becomes Clausen’s newly updated ‘girl at the gate’. The wistfulness – the half-con- cealed narrative underpinning her predecessor - has no place in the present picture, and the new fluidity in the artist’s brushwork is revealed in framing wild-flowers and foliage, while the child’s piercing gaze reaches out over the gate and takes possession of the passer-by. For all its innocence it address- es the ‘deep sensation of life’. Kenneth McConkey, August 2025 1. The stencilled ‘634LV’ on the stretcher refers to the Christie’s sale in 1959. 2. See McConkey 2012, p. 222, note 45. Katherine Frances Clausen married Conor O’Brien the famous Irish yachtsman in 1928. Her father had been a friend of Conor’s broth- er, the artist, Dermod O’Brien, since around the turn of the century. With a Danish father and mother from Aberdeen, Clausen was more cosmopolitan in outlook than many contemporaries. 3. Artist’s Account book, Royal Academy of Arts, London. ‘Pochade’, normally a small panel, in this instance refers to a loose piece of primed unstretched canvas tacked to a board. 4. Goupil Stockbook no 14, p. 82, at https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=http://archives.getty.edu:30008/getty_images/digitalresources/ goupil/goupil...j, accessed 17 August 2025. The work’s size is given as 23.5 x 16 and location ‘Londres’. This may be taken as in inches and approximate, since the painting was clearly reduced when later stretched. ‘Young’ may well refer to the distinguished Barbizon and Hague School collector, Alexander Young who owned several important Clausens. 5. George Moore, The Royal Academy’, Fortnightly Review, vol 57, January-June 1892, pp. 832-3; see also idem, Modern Painting, 1893, (Walter Scott), p. 116. 6. It was Moore who divulged that what had started out as a painting of the Faust ingenue, ‘Marguerite’, had dropped its literary pretensions in the process of realisation to become The Girl at the Gate – a young woman whose life of servility lay before her; see McConkey 2012, pp. 91-95. 7. Clausen left London for Childwick Green in Hertfordshire after his marriage in 1881, moved to Cookham Dean, Berkshire in 1885, and finally to Widdington in Essex in 1891; see McConkey 2012. 8. he painter had been at the sharp end of this when the Toulmins’ arable farm on which he lived at Childwick Green, was sold Blundell Maple to be converted to a stud farm; McConkey 2012, pp. 44-5. Fig 1 George Clausen, The Girl at the Gate, 1889, 171.4 x 138.4 cm, Tate Fig 2 George Clausen, The Mowers , 1891, 97.2 x 76.2 cm, Usher Gallery, Lincoln