Revival: Six Lectures on Painting (1904): Delivered to the Students of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, January 1904

by George Clausen

The chapters in this volume were delivered at lectures to students of the Royal Academy of Arts in January 1904 by George Clausen, who was at that time Professor of Painting. He approaches the subject a number of ways, including specific masters, styles, methods, techniques, contexts and composition. The book offers a balanced introduction to the subject, and to the modern reader, an insightful glimpse at an approach to this evergreen topic as delivered over 100 years ago.

Genres: Art

184 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 12, 2013

About the author

Sir George Clausen RA was an English artist working in oil and watercolour, etching, mezzotint, dry point and occasionally lithographs. He was knighted in 1927.

Reviews

[Janet Roger · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a treat! Clausen really knows his stuff, treats his audience with respect and left me with a very happy glow when he’d done. What more could you want from six lectures, even if they were delivered over a century ago?

His scope is immense with the first talk taking in two early and hugely influential painters – Fra Angelico and Masaccio – and the last one bringing his 1904 audience of students at the Royal Academy of Arts bang up to date with Realism and Impressionism. And along the way we get the eminent professor’s views on color and light, landscape and open-air painting and his enlightened take on such giants as Titian, Velasquez and Rembrandt.

No mean landscape artist himself and deeply committed to Impressionist techniques and principles he speaks with serious authority and warmth.

George Clausen lived on another forty years after these talks to see Impressionism branch out into Cubism, Fauvism, Pointillism and watched many more isms bloom and fade. What he would have made of Pop Art, Minimalism and Postmodernism we can only guess from what he writes with a shrug of his shoulders in the introduction to this collection of lectures:

“although we live in times when everything is in the melting-pot, including the Fine Arts, we know that the instinct for beauty, and for its expression in the Fine Arts is as natural and as necessary to our being as any other of our instincts and the cry of decadence is as old as the world itself.”