Portrait of Stanhope Forbes, R.A., 1915

Sir George Clausen RA (1852 - 1944)

RA Collection: Art

This portrait of the Newlyn School artist, Alexander Stanhope Forbes was probably privately commissioned from Clausen by Forbes's second wife, Maud Clayton Palmer, whom he married in the same year. She left the portrait to the Royal Academy in her will and it entered the collection in 1952. Forbes married Maud ('Maudie') Clayton Palmer two years after the death of his first wife, the Canadian born artist, Elizabeth Adela Forbes (née Armstrong) whom he had married in 1889. Maudie Palmer was a former pupil of the art school established by the Forbeses at Newlyn, Cornwall in 1899.

This relatively late image of Forbes is notable for the fact that the sitter is without the large moustache that is apparent in the majority of other known portraits and self-portraits. Forbes's sober clothing may relate to the circumstances of the First World War. The painting is comparable with Clausen's portrait of Mark Fisher, another artist friend and colleague (see 03/245), in as much as neither composition consciously references their public roles as artists. Clausen and Forbes had first met in 1882 at Quimperlé in Brittany where they were both sketching landscape and Breton peasantry.