Steer & Impressionism.
Steer was an admirer of Burne-Jones, Watts and Millais, but not as much as Turner whose art was a lifelong obsession. Though Steer is often grouped with the “English Impressionists” he took little notice of the original Impressionists while studying in Paris, which as Anthony Bertram suggests is because he had already imbibed their lessons from time spent looking at their art in the Goupil Galleries in London during the late 1880s, when he would have been exposed to artists like Monet, Renoir and Pissarro.[1] And as Charles Harrison says, claims for French influence should be circumspect since Steer returned from his two year stint in Paris “with virtually no understanding of the French language and with little enthusiasm for the Manet retrospective exhibition which he had seen at the end of his stay.”[2] What he did share with his French Impressionist counterparts however was the scorn of the daily press who gleefully sniped at his pictures: the Telegraph called his Bridge “either a deliberate daub or so much midsummer madness” and the Spectator wrote of “artistic perversity” in his art overall. Other considered opinions were voiced by the art critic and friend of Manet and Degas, George Moore who said “Mr Steer takes a foremost place in what is known as the modern movement.” But what was modern about Steer? Harrison has pointed out that Steer’s transition from brightly-hued pictures with speckled brushwork to watercolour and more informal landscapes reflects a shift commensurate with the “mainline of development within the NEAC: a gradual progress from moderate impressionism to moderate conservatism.” And Anthony Bertram draws our attention to the idea of Steer’s art as “wholly without “literature”” which aligns it with the art of aesthetic experiment and the operations of painting rather than symbols used to convey meaning or a history painting that could be read as a narrative. However, as Bertram says, what is quintessentially English about Steer is the presence of the English weather; “weather is an invisible abstraction, and Steer makes us see it.” This of course owes much to Turner.
[1] Bertram, A Century of British Painting 1851-1951, 70.
[2] Charles Harrison, English Art and Modernism 1900-1939, (Yale, 1981), 20.
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