Philip Wilson Steer 1860-1942

Acquired directly from the Artist's studio by Sir William Burrell (for £45)
His Sale, Christie’s, London, 10th May 1902 (sold for 44 gns, as La Jonquille) whence acquired by Holland
C. A. Jackson, Manchester
Clare Bennett, circa 1923
C. A. Jackson, Manchester
W.H. Wood, by 1929
C.A. Jackson, Manchester
Roland, Browse & Delbanco, London
Clare Bennett, and thence by descent to the present owner

London, N.E.A.C, April 1890, no. 16 (as Jonquil);
Liverpool, Autumn Exhibition 1890, no.819 (as Jonquil);
Brussels, Les XX, 1891, Steer no.3 (as Jonquil);
Glasgow, Institute of Fine Arts, 1893, no.729 (as Jonquils);
London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Artists in the British Isles at the beginning of the century, 20 March - 20 April, 1903;
Dusseldorf ,1904 (details untraced);
London, Tate Gallery, Philip Wilson Steer: Retrospective, 19-21 July 1929, no. 2;
London, Barbizon House, 1933 (details untraced);
London, Tate Gallery, P.W. Steer 1860-1942, 11th November - 11th December 1960, no.11; and toured by the Arts Council to Birmingham City Art Gallery, Birkenhead, Williamson Art Gallery, Swansea, Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Manchester City Art Gallery, Sheffield, Graves Art Gallery, Glasgow Art Gallery and Museum.
London, Camden Arts Centre, Decade 1890-1900, 11th January - 5th February 1967, no. 40; and toured by the Arts Council to Bath, Victoria Art Gallery, Swansea, Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Birmingham, City Art Gallery, Bolton Art Gallery, Bradford, City Art Gallery, Sheffield, Graves Art Gallery and Reading Art Gallery.

Art Journal, 1890, p. 57;
Pall Mall Gazette, 1890, ‘Pictures of the Year’, p.125, illustrated;
Robin Ironside, Wilson Steer, Phaidon, London, 1943, pl. 11;
D.S. MacColl, The Life, Work and Setting of Philip Wilson Steer, Faber & Faber, London, 1945, pp.42-44, 46, 107 and 191;
Clara Bennett, 'Jonquils', The Listener, 8 April 1971;
Bruce Laughton, Philip Wilson Steer 1860-1942, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1971, cat. No. 66.

It is only with hindsight that one is fortunate enough to look at any period of art history and see the connections and bridges that span from one epoch to another. London in the late 1880s and early 1890s was such a world. Steeped in the High Victorian ethos of the later work of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the Olympian fancies of Leighton and Alma-Tadema, the influence of European modern painting was nevertheless making clear inroads. Still a period when any ‘serious’ artist had to have studied in Paris, London’s links with true ‘modern’ painting were many. To Steer and his generation in London, their clear talisman of modern art was James Abbott McNeil Whistler, a friend and contemporary of Manet and the Impressionists, but his closest contemporary and co-star of the recently established New English Art Club was Sickert. A close friend of Degas, Sickert brought to London a sense of the way in which the city and the modern life within it could be brought into contemporary art.

Steer had, like many of his contemporaries, spent a reasonable amount of time in Paris and elsewhere in France since the early 1880’s, but from what we can deduce about his experiences, and by looking at the paintings of the period that survive, his influences seem to have been more attuned to Sargent and Whistler. There are a number of exhibitions of impressionist work, both in London and Paris, that Steer may have seen, but there is no conclusive evidence of his experiences. Several earlier small works demonstrate a spontaneity of handling that indicates strong impressionist tendencies, and the partially hatched and liquid Summer at Cowes (Coll.Manchester City Art Galleries) of 1887 shows a definite knowledge of Monet and Renoir.

However, over the next few years the obvious influence of French painting begins to subside and Steer’s work takes on a more individual and identifiable manner. Whistler’s example is still clear, and in the present work, the profile pose and the tonal harmonies do carry a Whistlerian aspect, but the imagery is very much Steer’s own. The subject is Rose Pettigrew (1872-c.1949), a professional model who sat extensively for Steer at this time. Along with her sisters Hetty and Lily, the Pettigrew sisters were the leading artists’ models of fin de siecle London, and they sat to virtually all the major figures, including Millais, Leighton, Poynter, Sargent and Whistler, but it is in Steer’s paintings of her that Rose Pettigrew becomes an image that is unforgettable. According to her reminiscences, written to D.S.MacColl in 1947 (printed in full in Bruce Laughton, op.cit., pp.113-121), she gives her age when first meeting Steer as twelve, although recent research by the Centre for Whistler Studies at the University of Glasgow has established that she was more likely to have been about fifteen or sixteen. In the late 1880’s she posed extensively for Whistler, and is the subject of a number of pastel studies. She seems to have first posed for Steer in the 1889 oil The Sofa (coll. Municipal Art Gallery, Pietermaritzburg) and the window in the background is clearly the same as that seen in Jonquils, painted slightly later but definitely completed by the April 1890 exhibition of the NEAC, where it was applauded by many of the critics, including George Moore and D.S.MacColl, who identified it as the picture of the exhibition. The most striking element of the painting is the way in which Steer draws attention to the sitter’s obviously youthful looks (she was nearly eighteen at the time) and arresting profile, using the severity of the black dress to balance the lighter, almost translucent, tones of the skin. Behind her she casts a strong shadow onto the window-frame and panes of glass, themselves an opaque dark blue, this simple rectilinear framework countering the square format of the canvas. Steer clearly worked hard to obtain this, and several pencil sketches that develop the idea of the double profile exist, and it is also possible to see the artist’s pentimenti where he adjusted the tension of the image: the sitter’s left hand was originally held higher, the dress had a lighter coloured waistband and the level of the window frame has also been lowered. The overall warm gaslight glow of the painting, and the dusk outside (with the just discernible red spots of cab lights in the street) gives the painting an intimate and contemplative quality, and as we know from the preparatory sketches that the flowers of the title were only introduced at a late stage, the unpretentious way in which the light effects are rendered give the painting a striking air of modernity, a fleeting moment captured.

Steer’s relationship with Rose was close, and we know that he asked her to marry him, an offer she rejected (she later married the violist H.Waldo Warner of the New English String Quartet), but in her memoir, she speaks warmly of Steer, considering herself fortunate to have ‘been greatly loved by two wonderful men’. Steer’s paintings of Rose are almost all of a uniformly high quality, and stand as one the most significant achievements within his oeuvre.

The original owner of Jonquils was Sir William Burrell, the Glaswegian magnate and collector, who was brought to Steer’s studio by Lavery, and he purchased the painting for 45 guineas, the artist’s first significant sale. It also has a further curious note in its history in that it was later owned by the same collector twice. Bought in Manchester in the early 1920s by Clare Bennett, she owned the painting until later in the decade but the effects of the Wall Street Crash forced a sale. Many years later, and after the end of WWII, she was in the gallery of Roland, Browse and Delbanco, and mentioned that she had once owned Jonquils. The gallery owner commiserated with her on her loss of such a fine painting and suggested she viewed their current exhibition of Degas bronzes. As she was about to leave the gallery, he called her back to his office and revealed the painting freshly removed from a travelling crate. After a little negotiation, Jonquils was repurchased. Clare Bennett undertook to search out the model and recalled that it ‘was a great moment when Rosie of the late Forties confronted pretty Rosie Pettigrew of the Nineties actually there, standing on my hearthrug.’ (Clare Bennett, op.cit., p.450)

Extensively exhibited in the first half of the twentieth century, Jonquils has however not been presented in public since its inclusion in the 1967 Decade 1890-1900 exhibition, and has almost certainly never been reproduced previously in colour. One of Steer’s most outstanding images, it provides us with a fortunate glimpse of the world that saw the first stirrings of a recognisably ‘modern’ form of painting in Britain.