Philip Wilson Steer, O.M., N.E.A.C.

Edward Napier Galloway, Altricham, Cheshire;
Charles Dunderdale, Manchester;
Percival Duxbury, Bury, Lancashire and thence by descent to the present owner

Manchester, Manchester City Art Gallery, 1885, no.829

D.S. MacColl, Life, Work and Setting of Philip Wilson Steer, 1945, p.188;
Bruce Laughton, Philip Wilson Steer, Oxford, 1971, no.13, p.127

The following condition report has been prepared by Hamish Dewar Ltd, 13 and 14 Mason's Yard, Duke Street, St James', London SW1Y 6BU: Structural Condition The canvas is unlined on what would certainly appear to be the original keyed wooden stretcher. There are some visible lines of craquelure, particularly those corresponding to the stretcher-bar lines but these are stable and secure and it is obviously most encouraging to find the canvas in its original unlined state. Paint surface The paint surface has an even varnish layer and only minimal lines of retouching filling lines of craquelure are identifiable under ultraviolet light. There is clearly a layer of engrained as well as surface dirt and the painting should respond well to cleaning and revarnishing. Summary The painting would therefore appear to be in very good and stable condition and while no further work is required for reasons of conservation, cleaning should be very beneficial.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

Late in life Philip Wilson Steer supplied his biographer, DS MacColl, with a list of places that he had visited on summer painting trips (DS MacColl, 1945, p. 186 (Appendix G). Looking back over fifty years he was confident that the earliest of these – in 1884 and 1885 – was to Walberswick in Suffolk. Situated on the Blyth estuary and affectionately known as ‘Wobbleswig’, this ancient village within in easy reach of London had been popular with early nineteenth century watercolourists such as Peter de Wint and Cornelius Varley. It was not however, until after it acquired its railway station in 1881, that a significant group of young painters arrived to plant their easels on its stony beach (Richard Scott, Artists at Walberswick, 1880-2000, 2002 (Art Dictionaries, Bristol); also Richard Scott, The Walberswick Enigma, 1994 (exhibition catalogue, Ipswich Borough Council).) Latterly its fame as the crucible of British Impressionism rests primarily upon Steer’s return visits in the late 1880s (Steer is reported to have returned in 1886 and 1889 and may have made one or more short visits in the period, 1890-1894).

The rediscovery of Tired Out, a painting that has not been seen in public since its exhibition in the Manchester Autumn Exhibition in 1885, sheds new light on this earliest phase of Steer’s career, predating even the long friendship between the artist and MacColl. Dugald Sutherland MacColl probably met Steer for the first time during the winter of 1889-90 when he was a student under Fred Brown at the Westminster School of Art. His first reference to the artist appeared in his New English Art Club review in The Spectator, 5 April 1890 (see Maureen Borland, DS MacColl, Painter, Poet, Art Critic, 1995, (Lennard Publishing), pp. 67-8). It enables us to consider afresh the question of Steer’s early influences and offers fresh insights into the development of the most complex and potentially confusing period of his work.

What then did Steer bring with him to Walberswick? In the summer of 1884 he had returned from Paris where he had been a student for the previous three years. Little is known about this formative period when he seems to have shied away from animated discussions in large British contingent at the atelier Julian. We know that he visited the Louvre and the exhibitions, and that he recalled Edouard Manet’s posthumous retrospective at the École des Beaux Arts in January 1884. Here he recalled seeing Manet’s Grand Canal, Venice, 1874 (private collection). (Both Laughton, 1971, pp. 3-5 and Jane Munro, ‘Introduction’, Philip Wilson Steer, 1860 -1941, Paintings and Watercolours, 1986 (exhibition catalogue, Arts Council), pp. 9-12, speculate upon what Steer may have seen during these formative years.) Although he is not mentioned specifically in Lavery’s account of the student debate during these crucial years it seems, from what we can see in Tired Out, that Steer was aware of the rivalry between two rising Salon stars, William Stott of Oldham and the American, Alexander Harrison. Lavery’s early biographer tells us that at the student hotels in the quartier latin the ‘all-important question’ was “Does Stott influence Alexander Harrison, or is Alexander Harrison influenced by Stott?” (Walter Shaw Sparrow, John Lavery and his Work, n.d., [1912], (Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co), p. 44.) In 1882 and 1883 both artists were showing large beach scenes, Harrison’s Chateaux en Espagne, ((Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) vying with Stott’s Ronde d’enfants (Durban Art Gallery, South Africa). Harrison’s picture, considered by some to be a tribute to Longfellow’s poem, ‘Castles in Spain’, was painted at Pont–Aven using sand transported from nearby beaches, and was exhibited at the Salon of 1882. Stott’s picture, which as Laughton points out, was reduced in size, was painted at Ravenglass and shown at the Salon of 1883. Stott showed a further Ravenglass picture, Les Deux Soeurs, (Rochdale Art Gallery), at the Salon of 1884.

The connections between both pictures and Tired Out are obvious enough. Harrison’s dreaming boy, retains the much of the naturalistic foreground detail we expect from a follower of Jules Bastien-Lepage, while Stott’s picture with its pinks and greys indicates a sensitivity to colour that would have appealed to Steer. Its sandbanks and shallow pools indicating a wide estuary also correspond to what he would find at Walberswick. If these two talisman beach scenes were in Steer’s mind as he made his way over the stones on the East Anglian coast, he may also have been thinking more widely of the French Impressionists who were coming increasingly to the fore. Monet’s work had been exhibited at Durand-Ruel’s new gallery in Paris in 1883 and during that year paintings by the Impressionists had been brought to London to be shown at Dowdeswell’s gallery. Laughton also points out that Steer’s return to London coincided with Whistler’s membership and presidency of the Society of British artists. He too had exhibited at Dowdeswell’s, a series of small beach scenes recently painted at St Ives, although Steer probably missed the show, since it was held in May 1884. Steer’s picture of a child reclining on the beach at Walberswick, would indicate the blue reflected sunlight in shadows, and its hazy east coast Whistlerian perspectives would be signposted by children beyond the immediate bank of stones and further away at the water’s edge. Space would additionally be articulated by alterations in handling – from impasto in the foreground, to smooth paint in the background. These rounded sea-washed stones under his feet, known as ‘knucklebones’, were almost palpable. And lastly, a clear pointer to his European lineage – his signature - would be confidently applied in bold block capitals in the manner of the Salon Naturalists. This was indeed what his Walberswick companions, Edward Stott, Walter Osborne, Blandford Fletcher, Nathaniel Hill and the Americans Arthur Hoeber and Willard Metcalf would do, and of these, Steer is likely to have learned most from Osborne and Fletcher who probably employed the same child models as he. Osborne’s major work An October Morning (1885, Guildhall Art Gallery, London) could for instance represent the same girl that posing for the present canvas.

There are of course important differences between these works. Where Steer’s girl sprawls uncomfortably on top of a crabber’s net, Osborne’s gazes wistfully towards the fishermen at the water’s edge, and where detail is uniformly treated in Osborne, Steer generalises in the middle distance, not wishing to distract attention from the focal point of the ensemble. Already there is foretaste of radicalism in his desire to modify the naturalistic and topographic elements of the scene.

When it was completed, Steer’s painting was dispatched to Manchester for the annual Autumn Exhibition where it appears to have been purchased by Edward Napier Galloway, an engineer, and one of the shareholders in Galloway Ltd, a steam boiler and metal tube manufacturer of Altrincham in Cheshire. (EN Galloway came from the same family as Charles John Galloway, also a shareholder in the family firm who owned works by Degas and Pissarro, as well as an extensive collection of paintings by Charles Edward Gregory. MacColl (1945, p. 26) claims, apparently erroneously that ‘Mr Galloway’ also owned Steer’s large Étaples painting, Girl leading Goats, 1885 (coll. Sarah Raven), see Laughton, 1971, p. 9.) The picture was briefly owned by Charles Dunderdale, also from the Manchester area, before it passed to Percival Duxbury, proprietor of Yates Duxbury and Sons, paper mills at Bury in Lancashire. Although it was thereby removed from public view, its significance for Steer’s future development cannot be disputed. The painting now known as Two Girls on a beach c.1885-6 (whereabouts unknown) clearly extends the artist’s preoccupation with children’s day-dreams. (This picture has been the subject of speculation with Millie and Gracie (Laughton no 24), being considered as the original title; see Bruce Laughton, ‘Unpublished paintings by Philip Wilson Steer;, Apollo, no 280, 1985; also Bruce Laughton, ‘Some further thoughts on Steer, 1985 (exhibition catalogue, Browse and Darby, London), n.p..) Walberswick was to be reprised the following year in Chatterboxes and shown at the New English Art Club in 1887 when he was also working also at Étaples on studies of children paddling and hunting for shellfish. These latter paintings have smooth Whistlerian surfaces that contrast with the more agitated handling of the panel sequence painted on Walberswick seafront in 1888. Indeed with its indication of a sand-spit and figures in the distance Tired Out anticipates Steer’s most radical works such as Figures on a Beach, Walberswick, 1888-9 (Tate). 

However the canvas which relies most heavily on Tired Out is undoubtedly Knucklebones, Walberswick, (fig.1) one of the artist’s most interesting later beach scenes. Shown at the ‘London Impressionists’ exhibition in 1889, it was praised by Walter Sickert as an ‘example of what is best in modern Impressionism’. Here the children are ‘natural and spontaneous’ and ‘their actions are studied with a keen insight into child nature’. (Walter Sickert, ‘Art: Whirlwind Diploma Gallery of Modern Pictures’, The Whirlwind, 12 July 1890, p. 37.) Although Steer may have had access to an illustration of Degas’ Bains de Mer: Petite Fille peignée par sa bonne, c.1868-77 (The Hugh Lane, Dublin) around 1888-9, his motif, as we can now see, was there in embryo as early as 1885. (Anne Gruetzner Robins, A Fragile Modernism, Whistler and his Impressionist Followers, 2007 (Yale University Press), p.107-8, makes this comparison which only becomes plausible after the publication of GW Thornley’s 15 Lithographies d’aprés Degas in 1889. Four of these lithographs were shown at the NEAC in the previous year although their subjects have not been identified. Steer owned an apparently incomplete set of these; see Laughton 1971, pp. 46-7.) 

Two years after this picture was first shown, Steer was asked to speak on the theme of ‘Impressionism in Art’ by the Art Workers’ Guild. He was, he stated, not addressing a ‘passing craze’. To those who considered it alien to British temperaments, Impressionism was, he claimed, ‘of no country and of no period’. Was it, after all, a craze to ‘recognize the fact that nature is bathed in atmosphere?’

Is it a fashion to treat a picture so that unity of vision may be achieved by insisting on certain parts more than others? No! it is not fashion, it is a law (MaColl, 1945, pp.177-8.)       

He would of course go on to produce classic Impressionist pictures in Children Paddling, Walberswick, 1889-94 (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge) and Girls Running, Walberswick Pier, 1889-94 (Tate), but the ‘laws’ contained in ‘unity of vision’ were well understood by 1885. When he was compiling his biography, MacColl wrote to George Clausen for his reminiscences of the early days when Steer and he were founder members of the New English Art Club. Clausen, then in his ninety-second year replied,

My impression at that time was of a man with a lazy mind, but gifted with a wonderful sense of colour, he never made a mistake about that. Since those days I have come to the conclusion that it was not a ‘lazy mind’, but a concentration on the problems of colour, almost to the exclusion of everything else. Whether consciously or not, he tried to express the fresh vision of a child … (Ibid, p. 27. )

 This incomparable vision is exactly what we see the present canvas.

 

 We are grateful to Kenneth McConkey for kindly preparing this catalogue entry.