High Mass by George Clausen

High Mass by George Clausen, 1876

Outside the church door

Mass has already begun, and the church is full. Through the open doorway at the left we see the backs of the congregation packed inside, a crowd of white caps in the dark. The people who could not get in kneel on the cobbles outside.

They are mostly women and children. The women wear close white caps, white collars and dark dresses, some with long striped skirts; they kneel in a row facing the door with their backs to us. In front of them the children kneel or sit in a loose group on the stones: a boy in a blue shirt, small girls in caps and aprons, one holding a book, and at the far left, against the door jamb, a little girl with a rosary in her hands. At the right edge a woman in a striped skirt and a man in a blue cap stand apart by a strip of grass and trees.

The church itself fills most of the canvas: a wall of red brick banded with pale stone, a heavy buttress, and carved figures standing on brackets high on the facade. The light is flat and even, and Clausen paints the round cobbles one by one across the whole foreground.

Volendam, Marken and Monnickendam

The full title is High Mass at a Fishing Village on the Zuyder Zee, Holland. According to the collection's entry on Art UK, the painting shows the village of Volendam and was made from sketches Clausen took on the island of Marken in 1875. The costumes are those of Volendam, a Catholic fishing village on the western shore of the Zuiderzee. The church, however, is the Protestant church of neighbouring Monnickendam, where no Catholic Mass would have been said. Clausen put Volendam's Catholic villagers in front of another town's church; the picture is a composition, not a record of one Sunday morning.

Clausen had gone to the Zuiderzee on a summer holiday with the painter Dewey Bates. Dutch fishing villages and their people run through his sketches and paintings of these years.

The Royal Academy, 1876

The picture was Clausen's first submission to the Royal Academy, and it was hung in the summer exhibition of 1876 at Burlington House, which ran from 1 May to 7 August. The critic of The Times took him for a Dutchman, calling him a clever Dutch painter hitherto known in England by only two drawings.

It is painted in oil on canvas and measures 47 by 83.8 centimetres. It belongs to Nottingham City Museums & Galleries (accession number NCM 1906-27), bequeathed by the executors of the estate of Henry Hirsch in 1906.

The painter

George Clausen (1852–1944) was born in London, the son of a decorative artist of Danish descent and a Scottish mother. He attended design classes at the South Kensington Schools from 1867 to 1873, worked in the studio of Edwin Long, and trained in Paris at the Académie Julian; he also studied briefly at the Antwerp Academy under Joseph van Lerius. He admired the naturalism of Jules Bastien-Lepage and became known for landscapes and scenes of rural life painted in outdoor light. He was a founding member of the New English Art Club in 1886, was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1895, served as Professor of Painting at the Academy, and was an official war artist during the First World War. He was knighted in 1927.

High Mass comes from before all that: a young painter's first Academy picture, of Catholic villagers at prayer outside a Protestant church.

Sources: Art UK, High Mass at a Fishing Village on the Zuyder Zee, Holland (Nottingham City Museums & Galleries) · Wikimedia Commons, File:Clausen, High mass.jpg · My Daily Art Display, Sir George Clausen part 1 · Wikipedia, Royal Academy Exhibition of 1876 · Wikipedia, George Clausen