Some pupils from a ladies' academy, the fashionably dressed daughters of well-to-do parents, are taking a midday walk in the street, lined up in a "crocodile" with the eldest at the head. Near them are female types clearly positioned by the artist to set off, by means of contrast, the blessings of youth, good looks, class, and education that the girls are fortunate enough to enjoy: a comically plain, bespectacled stick-figure of a schoolmistress brings up the rear; to the left an elderly milkmaid looks on, carrying her churns by that very emblem of the working class, a yoke across her shoulders; to the right a young flower girl, the lowliest of street vendors, practically a beggar, offers the girls a posy. The presence of the milkmaid and the flower girl, with their ruddy, outdoor complexions and the rural associations of their jobs, also suggests the idea of country as against town. The girls seem unaware of the milkmaid, but toward the poor flower girl-who is trying to attract their attention -show a range of responses from charity and pity to patent indifference: one girl holds her hand down to drop a coin; the girl on the far left turns her head with a becomingly melting expression; some, notably the one in front, look fixedly ahead.
The location of the scene is neither country nor town exactly, but suburban north London. The girls are walking down Haverstock Hill in the southern part of Hampstead, a distinctively modern, middle-class environment. The artist was renting one of the Mall Studios on nearby Tasker Road at the time, so the setting of his picture was almost on his doorstep. In all likelihood he painted the setting largely on the spot and the figures largely in the studio, making pencil studies for both in the sketchbooks that he always kept as part of his working process.
The most immediate precedent in Britain for this kind of modern-life scene, combining feminine beauty, fashion, and an understated element of social commentary, lay in the paintings of James Tissot, who had lived in London and enjoyed increasing success since 1871. Still young and casting around for a style to develop as his own, Clausen seems to have been looking particularly to Tissot at this point in his career. The slightly titillating way in which the girl dressed in light blue looks out of the picture, as if making eye contact with an assumed male viewer, is a typically Tissot-like touch; the line of girls behind her might represent the stages of girlhood, progressing from the mere children at the back to young women ripe for exchanges of looks with admirers. Like Venus in a Judgment of Paris, she is flanked by others not quite as pretty as she, and our encounter with her is given immediacy by the cutting-off of her figure by the bottom edge of the canvas, a device the artist may well, again, have borrowed from Tissot. The distinctive technique in which the work is painted, with its suggestions of the "raw" brushwork and color of avant-garde painting on the Continent, owes something to both Tissot and to the conservative form of Impressionism developed by Jules Bastien-Lepage, a key influence on many young British artists around this time.
Such foreign influences were a touchy issue, and it is typical that even those who admired Schoolgirls when it was first exhibited found the combination of everyday, modern subject and relatively adventurous technique difficult to take. "The first feeling about this picture is an angry one-that the artist should make all his damsels' features so blunt and indefinite in outline, and their complexions of such purply tinge," wrote the critic of The Times (November 20, 1880); but if we get over these drawbacks, and that, perhaps, of the subject itself-for schoolgirls in close column with lampposts behind, and a longish vista of pavement can hardly be said to lend themselves to pictorial treatment … what a fresh and charming little picture it is!" The girl in light blue was a favorite model of Clausen's, and she also appears in his follow-up picture of 1881, a larger scene of people on the same street entitled A Spring Morning, Haverstock Hill (Bury Art Gallery). After this he moved to the country and abandoned street scenes in favor of agricultural subjects, some presenting rural life with the bleakness of Thomas Hardy's novels.
