The Breakfast Table

During the Great War, George Clausen, now in his mid-sixties, was largely confined to London. Apart from mural commissions and those connected with the war, his subject matter was restricted to flower-pieces and scenes in and around his house at Carlton Hill, St John’s Wood where, on a spring morning, with sunlight streaming through the large sash window, The Breakfast Table was painted. The table is set with jugs, cups and napkins, a coffee pot and a large brown loaf of bread, and decorated with tulips, picked from the garden. Much of what we see can be found in a contemporary photograph, The interior at Carlton Hill, with Agnes Mary, Margaret Mary (Meg) and George Clausen, c.1914-18 (Private Collection).

These images of apparent domestic bliss were not unaffected by ongoing tragedy. An early casualty had been his daughter Kit’s fiancé to whom she was engaged to be married, and after 1914, as his son, Hugh, went off to war, constant worries were expressed in letters. The business of being a painter, nevertheless continued even in straightened circumstances and dealers and collectors must now beat a path to his door. Only in 1917 was he able to purchase Hillside, the cottage on Duton Hill in Essex, that became his country retreat and the site of his resplendent landscapes and rural scenes of the inter-war period. (For further reference see Kenneth McConkey, George Clausen and the Picture of English Rural Life, London, 2012, pp. 167-177.)

During that autumn, on 1 October 1917, Charles Obach, a print dealer and now a partner in Colnaghi’s, New Bond Street, brought Craig Annan, a member of the distinguished Glasgow Annan photography dynasty to Carlton Hill. (For the Annan dynasty, see William Buchanan, The Art of the Photographer, J Craig Annan, 1992 (exhibition catalogue, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh)). His Glasgow gallery had been actively dealing in pictures for a generation and was gathering stock for an exhibition of modern British art. Obach and Annan took The Breakfast Table on approval, and a month later the print dealer informed the artist that T. & R. Annan had decided to purchase it. Five years later, the painting was sold to James Howden Hume (1866-1938), the Chairman of James Howden & Co., the Glasgow engineering firm. Howden Hume had, since 1904, been amassing an important collection of pictures that included works by ‘Glasgow Boys’ - Lavery, Walton, Henry, Hornel and Macaulay Stevenson, and in recent years he had branched out to acquire paintings by Brangwyn, Cadell, Orpen, Shannon and Sims, as well as two by Claude Monet. The Breakfast Table fitted comfortably into this context. (see https://glasgowmuseumsartdonors.co.uk/james-howden-hume-1866-1938. I am grateful to Harry MacAuslan for his assistance in researching his great grandfather’s collection.)

It is doubtful if Annan or his client, knew about the personal significance of this small Clausen still-life. In 1890, when his daughters were infants, Clausen had painted the first Breakfast Table (National Trust, Standen). Unused at the time to painting interiors in tiny, poorly-lit rooms, the picture had given him problems and had to be reduced before it became satisfactory. Deeply personal, it was never sold, but it set forth a challenge that was only taken up 25 years later in paintings such as The Window, 1912 (National Gallery of South Africa, Cape Town), Winter Morning, Interior, 1915 (Private Collection) and the present work. Returning to this domestic subject, clarity of vision was essential. This breakfast table, with its glowing objects, its sensitivity to colour and to the fall of light, was the perfect expression of all that great painting was about. Throughout his career, Clausen had been an admirer of Vermeer, an artist who only came to prominence in his youth, and when in 1920, he set down his thoughts on the Dutch master, he emphasised the quality of paint. ‘It is impossible’, he wrote,
'To get good clear paint, to keep the paint throughout of good quality, if it is teased and tormented with alterations and repaintings. The best paint is that which is laid truly and directly in its place. That is one of the secrets of Vermeer’s clear colour, that it rests on good drawing.' (George Clausen, ‘Vermeer of Deft and Modern Painting’, [1920], in Northbourne, Clausen and Howe, Charlton Lectures on Painting, Oxford, 1925, p. 77.)

That firm grasp of spatial layering, of ‘good clear paint’ finding its place, is what emerges from this resplendent still-life.

We are grateful to Professor Kenneth McConkey for his assitance in preparing this catalogue entry.