^
Born on 28 December 1860: Philip Wilson
Steer, British painter who died on 21 March 1942.
— Steer was born at Birkenhead, England. His ancestors were Devon yeoman
farmers and shipbuilders. His father, an art teacher, had moved north in
order to take up a post there. When Steer was four the family moved to Ross-on-Wye,
Herefordshire, where his father died seven years later. As a child he had
plenty of opportunity and encouragement to experiment with drawing and painting.
He came across a book containing engravings of the old masters shown in
the Manchester Exhibition of 1857. His careful scrutiny of these left him
with a great admiration for Turner. He went to Hereford Cathedral School
and Glouster Art School.
In 1882 Steer went to Paris, where he entered
the Académie Julian and a year later the École des Beaux-Arts.
He had to leave the latter when it was made compulsory to pass an examination
in French. So he returned to England, having seen a little of contemporary
French art apart from the 1883 Édouard
Manet memorial exhibition. Back in London he took a studio, working
and teaching all the winter and spending the summers by the sea.
In 1886, aged 26, Steer was a founding member
of the New English Art Club, which brought him into contact with Whistler.
The club stood firm against William Morris's condemnation of modern painting
and made it its aim to use everyday things for subject-matter. Steer was
greatly concerned with the visible world and made innumerable landscape
studies. He loved the sea, and one of his favorite themes was young girls
on the shore. The blurred, misty quality of his On the Pier-head
(1887) aroused public antagonism.
About 1888 his mature style established itself
and for about five years he was the most advanced painter in England. The
dominant influences on him of Whistler and Manet gave way to a clear awareness
of Impressionism.
An exhibition of Impressionist paintings held in the early 1880's at Dowdeswells
was his first introduction to Monet
and Renoir,
and in 1889 there was another Impressionist exhibition, in Goupil's London
gallery.
After some years, however, Steer's style
changed. He began to work up his pictures at home rather than paint entirely
direct from nature. His color became heavier, his forms more substantial.
The painters who then inspired him were Constable,
Gainsborough,
Rubens,
and Tintoretto.
For 31 years, from 1899 to 1930, he taught at the Slade School of Art, London,
finding gentle phrases for his criticism and giving more attention to his
students' sense of color than to anything else. He was influenced by his
fellow teacher Henry Tonks and particularly by Turner.
Steer held many exhibitions. His first one-man
show was in 1894 and he had a retrospective exhibition at the Tate Gallery
in 1929. But although his work was usually pleasing, he failed to live up
to his earlier promise. By 1940 his eyesight, which had been deteriorating
for some time, was almost totally gone.
— The son of painter Philip Steer [–1871], Philip Wilson Steer
joined the Department of Coins and Medals at the British Museum in 1875
but found the demands of the Civil Service examination too rigorous and
turned to painting in 1878. He studied first at the Gloucester School of
Art under John Kemp and from 1880 to 1881 at the South Kensington Drawing
Schools. He was rejected by the Royal Academy Schools and went to Paris
in October 1882, where he enrolled first at the Académie Julian under
William-Adolphe Bouguereau. In January 1883 he transferred to the Ecole
des Beaux-Arts and studied under Alexandre Cabanel.
Steer exhibited at the Royal Academy between
1883 and 1885 and at the Paris Salon in 1884. These early paintings were
constrained student works, but after his return to England in the summer
of 1884 he assimilated contemporary French painting. The popular rural naturalism
of Jules Bastien-Lepage was particularly influential and evident in At
the Well, Walberswick (1884). As a figure painter, Steer was influenced
by Whistler and Degas. In Young Girl in a White Dress (1892), his
handling of the white dress, grey background and pink details recalls Whistler's
manipulation of tone, while the unusual viewpoint and arbitrary truncation
of form in Self-portrait with Model (1894) refer to Degas's compositional
effects of spontaneity. Portraits of his favourite model, Rose Pettigrew,
executed in the early 1890s, are the most relaxed and original in this genre.
By the beginning of the 1890s Steer was the
leading follower of French Impressionism in England. The beach scenes he
painted between 1887 and 1894 on the English and French coasts are indebted
to Monet and Sisley in the use of a flecked brushstroke to apply pure, unmixed
colour directly to the canvas. However, Steer's use of Impressionist techniques
was idiosyncratic and determined by his response to the form and color of
his chosen motifs. In some cases his technique emphasized the decorative
quality of the painting. In Knucklebones, Walberswick (1888), for
example, the shingle beach is rendered as a mosaic in a manner akin to Divisionism.
In Girls Running, Walberswick Pier (1889) Steer extensively reworked
the composition until the balance between naturalistic representation and
the demands of the picture surface came close to Symbolism.
In the late 1880s and early 1890s Steer was
active in establishing alternative exhibiting bodies in London. In 1886
he became a founder-member of the New english art club, and in 1889 he participated
in the first and only exhibition of the London Impressionists at the Goupil
Gallery. He exhibited at the avant-garde exhibition of Les XX in Brussels
in 1889 and 1891 and in 1893 joined the staff of the Slade School of Fine
Art, London.
Steer's style underwent radical change from
about 1895, when he began consciously to reassess the works of the Old Masters.
In landscape painting this led him to re-examine the work of Rubens, Constable
and Turner and to select his subject-matter from the august countryside
of inland Britain. Between 1893 and 1911 he visited many of the favoured
sites of the 18th-century picturesque tour, in particular Yorkshire, north
Wales and the West Country. He used the landscape conventions of previous
periods to introduce an epic quality, or sense of grandeur, to the scene.
The wide vista and high viewpoint of Rainbow Landscape, Bridgnorth
(1901) specifically recalls Rubens's Rainbow Landscape, while the
dramatic impact of Steer's Chepstow Castle (1905), in which the castle
is situated high above the precipitous cliffs and silhouetted against a
bright but unrestful cloudy sky, is dependent on Turner's mezzotint of the
same subject (reproduced as River Wye in Turner's Liber Studiorum,
1812). Constable's influence on Steer is evident in the vigorous paint handling
of his mature landscape style and in his fascination for the emotive effects
of cloud formations. Both aspects can be seen in La Grande Place, Montreuil
(1907).
Steer's return to the Old Masters also had
a marked effect on his figure painting in the 1890s. His enthusiasm for
Gainsborough, Boucher and Watteau is reflected in a number of fancy pictures
and nudes in which the spirit of Rococo sensuality prevails, for example
the Toilet of Venus (1897) and The Embarkment (1900). These
and paintings such as Hydrangeas (1901), as well as the freely painted
landscape sketches of 1908 to 1909, were often no more than pretexts for
indulging in exuberant paint handling.
Steer began to paint in watercolor in the
early 1890s, although he always regarded the medium as preliminary to his
oil paintings. Apart from a brief period (c. 1906–7) when he
experimented with gouache, the style of his watercolors is characterized
by the controlled placing of pigment on white paper, using the transparency
of thin color washes to ensure the maximum resonance of tonal relationships.
In 1927 Steer began to lose his sight in
one eye and proceeded to paint almost exclusively in watercolour. His style
in both oil and watercolour became looser yet compositionally more refined
with his deteriorating vision, verging occasionally on total abstraction,
as in the watercolour Showery Weather, Mill Beach (1933). In 1929
he was the first artist to have a major retrospective exhibition in his
own lifetime at the Tate. He continued to teach at the Slade until 1930
and was awarded the OM in 1931.
— LINKS
— Boulogne
Sands - Children Shrimping (1891, 48x57cm; 2/5 size, 50kb _ ZOOM
to main detail; full size, 330kb) _ With carelessly applied dots of
light color, Steer pretends to create the impression of a shimmering sky,
and with random strokes of paint, to convey the reflections of light on
the watery sand. The tide is out, and people are scattered across the spacious
beach: children in the foreground gather shrimps, while those in the background
are simply strolling. All the figures are painted swiftly, the cursory brushstrokes
allegedly evoke their movement, as well as the fall of light upon them.
{A more likely explanation is the laziness of the painter and his contempt
for the uncritical critics who dream up such excuses for shoddy work.}
— Boulogne
Sands (1891, 61x76cm) _ In the early 1880s Steer studied in Paris, where
he encountered the work of the French Impressionists. After his return to
England in 1884, he painted a series of luminous and brightly colored scenes,
often based around the beach, a location which can be linked with Monet’s
paintings of the same period. The loose brushwork and sparkling colors brilliantly
capture the transience and exhilaration of childhood and summer vacations.
His use of strongly contrasting colors draws on theories being promoted
by the most avant-garde painters in France at this time.
— Mrs.
Cyprian Williams and her Two Little Girls (1891, 76x102cm; 379x512pix,
30kb) _ Steer painted this portrait of the family of an art collector for
an exhibition. He had painted Impressionist views of girls at the seafront
a little earlier, and here he used a similarly unusual composition and lighting
for a modern portrait in an interior. Mrs. Williams was a friend of Sickert
and Aubrey Beardsley in the 1890s, and was renowned for her distinctive
features and volatile temperament, which Steer captures in the severity
of her gaze. The unusual close-up viewpoint, looking down on the subject,
is derived from Edgar Degas. The two girls, in black dresses, sit across
the room from their mother, who is not looking at them. One girl, clutching
a doll, looks wistfully at her mother. The other is engrossed in a picture
book, her neglected doll fell on the floor beside her.
— What
of the War? (1881, 92x68cm) _ old bearded man reading a newspaper.
— The
Music Room (1906, 102x127cm)
— Knucklebones,
Walberswick (1888) — Girl
and St. Bernard Dog (1899) |
^
Born on 28 December 1883: Abraham
Abel George “Buck” Warshawsky,
US artist who died in 1962. 
