Youth Mourning
1916 painting by George Clausen
Youth Mourning is a 1916 allegorical oil painting by the British artist George Clausen.
History and description
Painted at the height of the First World War it features a nude young woman, who is a personification of youth, kneeling before a wooden cross in a desolate landscape resembling No man's land during the trench warfare of the conflict. In the background are flooded shell craters.
Clausen's daughter Katherine's fiancée was killed in action on 12 March 1915 on the Western Front. The artist produced this work to commemorate the fallen and the grief of those at home. The painting was displayed at the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition of 1916 at Burlington House in Piccadilly, receiving generally complimentary reviews for its pathos. Today it is part of the collection of the Imperial War Museum in London.
References
Bibliography
Smith, Elsie Lawton. Evelyn Pickering De Morgan and the Allegorical Body. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002.
“Youth Mourning” enters the record as 1916 painting by George Clausen. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Youth, Mourning and painting can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Youth Mourning” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Youth, Mourning and painting provides the most credible route into that argument.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q29881728. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1916, 1915 and 2002.
Later fame can flatten the distinction between original context, subsequent adaptation and institutional collecting history. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Youth Mourning” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.