Biography

English painter of landscape and occasional portraits and figure studies. He was a leading figure in the Impressionist movement in Britain.

The son of a painter, Philip Steer (d. 1871), Philip Wilson 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 (1868-1976) 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.

The training in Paris was both conservative and academic and Steer was not excited by it. He did not take part in Paris society, not having much money and, more important, not speaking French. This was the principal reason for his having to leave: the Beaux Arts introduced examinations in French which obliged him to return to England in summer 1884. While in Paris, he saw modern French art.

The stylistic effect was not immediate. Steer began at this time to establish his pattern of painting portraits in London during the winter and landscapes during summer travels. In town Steer was inspired by Whistler. At the seaside the French flavour began to emerge. Just as Steer's whole career can look like the work of several different painters, he clearly had trouble at this time deciding on a firm direction.

Steer was one of the founders of the New English Art Club in 1886, a group of British artists who felt their work was neglected by the Royal Academy. Around 1892 Steer was producing the beach scenes and seascapes that are regarded not only as his finest works but also as the best Impressionist pictures painted by an Englishman, which, on the whole, seemed to have missed, almost completely, the Impressionist movement outside the few within the New English Art Club.

Between 1893 and 1930 Steer taught painting at the Slade School of Fine Art, London. Based in Chelsea, in the summers he painted in Yorkshire, the Cotswolds and the West Country and on the south and east coasts of Britain. During World War I he was recruited by Lord Beaverbrook, Minister of Information, to paint pictures of the Royal Navy.

Throughout the 1920s Steer increasingly experimented with watercolour, a technique which provided him with a route out of the heavy impasto characteristic of his oils. These watercolours, impressionist in the strictest sense of the term, partly reflect the later works of Turner, but also signal a return to Monet and to a Whistlerian approach.

He continued painting landscapes and waterscapes until 1938 when his eyesight became too bad to go on.