Realism, that is to say the desire to compete with nature, to be
nature, is the disease from which art has suffered most in the last
twenty years. The disease is now at wane, and when we happen upon a
canvas of the period like "Labourers after Dinner", we cry out, "What
madness! were we ever as mad as that?" The impressionists have been
often accused of a desire to dispense with the element of beauty, but
the accusation has always seemed to me to be quite groundless, and
even memory of a certain portrait by Mr. Walter Sickert does not cause
me to falter in this opinion. Until I saw Mr. Clausen's "Labourers" I
did not fully realise how terrible a thing art becomes when divorced
from beauty, grace, mystery, and suggestion. It would be difficult to
say where and how this picture differs from a photograph; it seems to
me to be little more than the vices of photography magnified. Having
spoken so plainly, it is necessary that I should explain myself.

The subject of this picture is a group of field labourers finishing
their mid-day dinner in the shade of some trees. They are portrayed in
a still even light, exactly as they were; the picture is one long
explanation; it is as clear as a newspaper, and it reads like one. We
can tell how many months that man in the foreground has worn those
dreadful hobnailed boots; we can count the nails, and we notice that
two or three are missing. Those disgusting corduroy trousers have hung
about his legs for so many months; all the ugliness of these
labourers' faces and the solid earthiness of their lives are there;
nothing has been omitted, curtailed, or exaggerated. There is some
psychology. We see that the years have brought the old man cunning
rather than wisdom. The middle-aged man and the middle-aged woman live
in mute stupidity--they have known nothing but the daily hardship of
living, and the vacuous face of their son tells how completely the