Harold Knight (1874-1961)
A Cornish Boy, 1917
POA
Sir George Clausen (1852-1944)
Pensive
Oil on canvas; signed and dated 1895, dated and inscribed 'Cinderella' on the back in another hand and labelled
18 x 14 inches
POA
Provenance
Goupil Gallery, London, 1895, no 24251;
Christie's, 27 May 1905
Exhibitions
New Gallery, London, 1896, no 121;
Royal Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts, 1900, no 89
Literature
Robert Alan Mowbray Stephenson, The New Gallery, Pall Mall Gazette, 27 April 1896, p 3;
Kenneth McConkey, George Clausen and the Picture of English Rural Life, Atelier; Books Lt: Edinburgh, 2012, p 118-119, ill p 117;
Kenneth McConkey, Cinderella, October 2012
In 1895, the year of this painting, Clausen began a series of pictures of local village girls in Widdington, Essex, where he lived. This girl’s name was Lizzie Deller. Pensive, later titled Cinderella, is delicately rendered and softly lit, and was the first painting of this series. The change of title was a suggestion from Clausen’s dealer, David Croal Thomson of Goupil’s, to romanticise the subject. When it was exhibited in The New Gallery in 1896, a critic for the Pall Mall Gazette remarked that the artist had captured ‘a creature exquisitely tender in nature’.
