At the end of January 1911, the Grafton Gallery rooms in which Roger Fry’s Manet and the Post-Impressionists had closed only a fortnight earlier were rehung for the inaugural exhibition of the National Portrait Society. Among the bravura set-pieces by John Singer Sargent, John Lavery, William Orpen and Glyn Philpot, the picture that caught the tone of the moment was by an artist whom the press had long since filed away as a painter of plein-air landscape. Philip Wilson Steer’s full-length portrait of Mrs Geoffrey Blackwell was the work of a British Impressionist who, at fifty, had stepped back across a century and a half into the manner of Gainsborough.

Shirley Maud Lawson-Johnston (1889–1943), of Beckett House, Shrivenham in Berkshire, had married Thomas Geoffrey Blackwell on 5 October 1909. She was twenty-one when she sat. Her husband, then aged twenty-five, was the grandson of Thomas Blackwell, who in 1830, with Edmund Crosse, had founded the preserved-provisions firm that bore their names; his father, Thomas Francis Blackwell, had been Managing Director and High Sheriff of Middlesex. Geoffrey had entered the company in 1905 and by the time of his wife’s portrait was an heir to the largest producer of tinned and bottled produce in Britain. He had, however, inherited more from his father than a seat on the Crosse & Blackwell board. Thomas Francis had been a client of Agnew’s, and his son’s collecting instincts ran in a more adventurous direction still.

On 22 April 1909, four months after his engagement had been announced, Blackwell read C. J. Holmes’s review of Steer’s exhibition at the Goupil Gallery in The Times. He went at once to Regent Street, bought the Whistlerian Boulogne Casino and a second picture that afternoon, and began a friendship with the painter that would last for the rest of their lives. Two weeks earlier, at 44 Bedford Square, Holmes himself had sat with D. S. MacColl, Roger Fry, Charles Aitken and Robert Ross on the provisional committee of what, by May 1910, would be constituted as the Contemporary Art Society; Blackwell would join its Executive Committee in 1914 and serve for fourteen years. He moved, in other words, into the intimate circle of the critics whose writing was reshaping British taste at the moment of his marriage, and in the months that followed he commissioned from Steer his wife’s portrait. Steer replied in a letter to Blackwell on Boxing Day 1909, 'I shall be pleased to undertake it and do my best to make a success of it' (British Library, MS add 46193).

The young Mrs Blackwell is set in the dunes, drawn up against a sky of streaked cumulus. A wide straw picture hat with a deep cobalt silk band frames the face; beneath its brim, her hair, auburn almost copper where it catches the light, is piled in soft Edwardian curls. The dress is a confection of white lace and tiered muslin, buttoned to the neck with a high ruched collar and sashed at the waist with a broad pink silk bow. At her breast hangs a small oval locket in sapphire-and-guilloché enamel. Her hands, unadorned, are folded loosely in her lap. At the lower left, a brimstone butterfly lifts from the marram grass, a quiet citation of Gainsborough’s portrait of his daughters chasing a butterfly (c. 1756, National Gallery, London), and beyond her shoulder, at the right edge, the merest sliver of distant coastline is let in below the horizon.

The costume historian Stella Mary Newton, consulted by Bruce Laughton, described the dress ‘pure 1860s fancy’. Steer indeed had neither dressed his sitter in the mode of 1910 nor reached back, as some of his contemporaries did, to the full eighteenth-century masquerade; he has gone instead to the mid-Victorian moment in which Tissot and Whistler, working in London in the 1870s, had themselves rediscovered the grand manner of Gainsborough and Reynolds. The result is a triple refraction: a twenty-one-year-old bride of 1910, dressed in 1860s revival taste, painted in the 1770s idiom of Reynolds’s The Ladies Waldegrave (1780, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh). Younger Jazz Age portraitists, Ambrose McEvoy in particular, were watching closely.

There is a smaller preparatory oil, Study for Mrs Geoffrey Blackwell (1910, Blackwell family collection), relating to the present work. It lacks, as Laughton noted, the depth of characterisation and the airiness of the finished canvas; in it Steer’s mind was still on the mechanics of the pose. Laughton’s most illuminating comparison, however, is with the slightly earlier Mrs Violet Hammersley (1906–7, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney), a grand-manner portrait. The two paintings share a format and a temperature of ambition, but not a sitter: Mrs Hammersley, a Bloomsbury hostess and patron, is conceived as a matriarchal presence in contrast to the youthful and demure Shirley Blackwell. The painting is signed and dated 1911, noted accordingly in Laughton (no. 452), but the National Portrait Society show opened at the end of January; it is likely as such that the canvas was finished in the closing months of 1910 and dated as it left the studio.

The London press of 20 January 1911 returned to the picture repeatedly. One reviewer found it ‘attractive in its airiness’; another, struck by the scrupulous finish of the flesh against the freely-brushed dunes, pronounced Steer ‘genuinely imbued with Pre-Raphaelitism’. The observation was acute, though not quite right. What Steer had done was to allow himself, within a single canvas, two registers at once: the head modelled with the careful, almost sculptural finish of the exhibition portraitists he had grown up among, and the ground, the sky and the dress painted with the swift, broken touch he had learned from Monet at the end of the 1880s. That the picture could be read as Pre-Raphaelite at all, weeks after the Grafton had been the scene of the most violent aesthetic quarrel in a generation, measures how deftly Steer had steered between the two camps.

The portrait remained in the Blackwell family for more than a century, passing from Geoffrey Blackwell, O.B.E., who continued to present works through the Contemporary Art Society to the Tate and to museums across the country until his death in 1943. Steer would paint other girls in blue; none found quite the balance of this one. Mrs Geoffrey Blackwell stands at the exact hinge of his career, the picture in which the painter of Knucklebones, Walberswick (1888,Colchester and Ipswich Museums Service) accepted that the next chapter would be written in the company of Gainsborough and Reynolds rather than of Monet and Pissarro. It is the portrait of a young bride caught, quite unknowingly, at a turning in English art.