Biography for Sir George Clausen

Education

Clausen took evening classes at South Kensington in 1867 and later studied at Julian's in 1883 under Bouguereau.

Member

He was elected to the RA in 1908.

Travels

He visited Holland and Belgium in 1875 and worked in Brittany in France for some time. He also visited Hungary in 1894 and Italy in 1898 and 1903.

Employment

In 1867-73 he was employed by Messrs Trollope, Chelsea decorators. Following a commission to do decorative work at the house of Edwin Long, he became a researcher of historical details for Long's paintings. He was made a professor of painting at the Royal Academy in 1903. His lectures, attended by the public and critics as well as the art students, were trememdously popular. His advice to the students was conservative - follow the Old Masters - this at a time when Picasso, Braque, Brancusi and Modigliani in Paris were taking fundamentally new directions in painting and sculpture. Clausen was not completedly unaware of this; in 1913 he reaffirmed 'the inherent rightness of good artistic expression' against 'on the one hand, the extravagance of the Futurists, Cubists and so-called Post-Impressionists, and on the other, the increasing development of photography, the popularity of the Kinematograph, which seems destined to take the place of a picture with a story...'