Philip Wilson Steer

Characterful study of the artist's cat

Philip Wilson Steer was born at Birkenhead on December 28th, 1860. He was the son of Philip Steer, a painter of portraits and a teacher of painting. The Steer family moved to Apsley House, Whitchurch, Monmouth, when Wilson Steer was three years old and he lived there for 17 years attending the Hereford Cathedral School and, when he was about 18, he was studying drawing and painting under John Kemp at the school of art at Gloucester. He failed to enter the Academy Schools and went to Paris in 1882, studying first at Julian’s under Bougurean and later, in 1883, at the Beaux-Arts under Alexandre Cabanel. He exhibited two works at the academy: Fantaisie, the head of an Italian girl and Discovery, a painting of a woman with a mask, which the artist later destroyed. The grafting of French Impressionism on English stock has, perhaps, been Steer’s chief contribution to art in paintings from Wilson, Gainsborough, Turner and Constable and has been worthily continued to our days. It is interesting that the real impetus towards this only came to him later than his residences in Paris in 1882–83, through the exhibition at Dowdeswell of the works of Monet, Pissarro and Renoir. As a result of the French training of British artists, Scottish and English, in 1886 the New English Art Club, of which Steer had been for more than 30 years a cornerstone, was inaugurated, Steer contributing one oil painting, Andante.