Youth Mourning
George Clausen, 1916
Youth Mourning is an allegorical oil on canvas painted by George Clausen in 1916, at the height of the First World War. It shows a nude young woman, a personification of youth, kneeling before a wooden cross in a desolate landscape that recalls the no man's land of the trenches. In the background, flooded shell craters can be seen. According to the sources, Clausen conceived the work as a tribute to the fallen and to the grief of those waiting at home, and it is linked to the death of the fiancé of his daughter Katherine, killed in action on the Western Front in March 1915. The painting was shown at the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition of 1916, where critics generally praised its pathos. Today it belongs to the Imperial War Museum in London. Its interest lies in how it turns the experience of war into a restrained, symbolic image of mourning, with the young nude body before the cross standing as an emblem of a sacrificed generation.
- Painter
- George Clausen
- Date
- 1916
- Medium
- oil paint, canvas
- Dimensions
- 91 × 91 cm
- Museum
- Imperial War Museum London, London Borough of Southwark
- Depicts
- grave, naked woman, Christian cross