“A Summer’s Evening is the first painting by a British

artist to undertake, on the European scale and on

European terms, the synthesis of Divisionist colour

theory with the high tradition of the female nude

that the rest of the avant-garde was still circling.

It remains the work of a young painter who was

demonstrably ‘dans le mouvement’, at a time when

most of his British contemporaries were scarcely

aware of the impact it would have: a feat of insight,

instinct, intuition or genius that we have barely

begun to understand.”

Professor Kenneth McConkey

Quelle flambée de soleil! … Des

parallèles ne manqueront pas de

s’établir entre les Baigneuses de

Steer et les Poseuses de Seurat.’

(What a burst of sunshine! … Parallels will

undoubtedly be drawn between Steer’s

Baigneuses and Seurat’s Poseuses.)

Review in Le Courrier de l’Escaut, 1889

On the morning of 7 May 1891, Lucien Pissarro called at Philip Wilson Steer’s studio in Maclise Mansion, Addison Road, Chelsea. The twenty-eight-year-old son of the great Impressionist Camille Pissarro had introduced himself the evening before at the Art Workers’ Guild, where Steer, no public speaker, had read a careful paper on the genealogy of Impressionism in front of a sceptical English audience. Writing to his father that afternoon, Lucien’s verdict was immediate:

‘Il devise le ton à notre façon et est très intelligent, c’est un artiste enfin!’

(He divides the tones as we do, and is intelligent: here is, at last, an artist).

Where others were dabblers and dilettantes, here was a peer. Among the canvases Lucien must have seen on the studio wall that morning, returned two years earlier from its showing in Brussels, was the present picture: A Summer’s Evening, painted in the winter of 1887–8. In a single leap, it had lifted Steer onto the top table of the European avant-garde, and in its application of current Impressionist techniques, it demonstrated a more profound understanding of the future development of western art than anything by his immediate British contemporaries. Arguably, its place in the history of Impressionism has never been fully acknowledged.

The claim is not a small one, but the documentary evidence supports it. At two and a quarter metres wide, this is the most radical British painting between the high Pre-Raphaelite moment and the arrival of Roger Fry, conceived in direct competition with the largest canvases in the European avant-garde. When the picture went to Brussels for Les XX in February 1889, it was hung beside Seurat’s Les Poseuses (1886–8, Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia); and when Belgian critics wrote it up, they wrote up the two canvases together. L’Éventail (2 February 1889), placed Steer in the same bracket as pre-eminent, innovative neo-impressionists noted:

‘Laissons charaviser, les Seurat, Les Steer, les Pissarro et les Gaugin. Ils y arriverent, peut-être, à leur tour.’

Three figures occupy a deserted shore at the foot of low chalk cliffs. To the right, a young woman with copper hair gathered into a high knot stands in profile, her arms raised above her head as she lifts a length of pale muslin behind her shoulders, her sun-warmed body silhouetted against the cool turquoise sweep of the sea. To her left, another bather sits with her back to the viewer, her hands lifted to her hair, while behind, a third figure reclines on the beach. Yellow wildflowers punctuate the foreground, and the entire sheet of sand and flesh is built up in tiny touches of pure pigment, broken over a warm ground in the manner Steer’s friend D. S. MacColl was later to call ‘broken handling’.

Steer was twenty-seven when he began the painting, and it inaugurates one of the most fertile periods of experimentation of any British painter of his generation. It was not motivated by the desire to discover a successful formula – commercial or otherwise – so much as by an open and unconditional quest for visual understanding.

Returning in 1884 from three years at the Académie Julian, Steer was, in James Laver’s later phrase, a young man whose academic universe had had its bottom blown out by the recent Manet memorial exhibition in Paris. The next four summers register a sequence of close attentions to the most advanced painting of his moment. Tired Out (1885, Private Collection), exhibited at the Manchester Autumn Exhibition that year, was followed by Chatterboxes (1886, Private Collection), shown at the Liverpool Autumn Exhibition in 1886 before is unveiling at the second New English Art Club exhibition in spring 1887. It drew the perceptive verdict of one critic that the painter had been working ‘in a French garden … in the eccentric manner just now affected by some of the “Independent Artists” in the Champs Élysées’, the very group Félix Fénéon had only that autumn baptised néo-impressionniste. Steer is documented as having owned Michel-Eugène Chevreul’s celebrated Principles of Harmony and Contrast of Colours (1854), and on the reverse of an unfinished Walberswick panel of 1886–7, now at Glebe House, Donegal, an exercise in pure Divisionist taches survives. By the autumn of 1887, with the small Two Girls on the Beach (whereabouts unknown) behind him, he was ready to take the method onto the largest canvas of his career.

What he then refused to do is as significant as what he did. The classical apparatus by which a nude could be made admissible at the Royal Academy - the goddess title, the Italian quotation, the dim picture-gallery palette, held no interest for him. In 1887, William Stott, painting his own female nudes, had felt obliged to call them Venus rising from the Sea Foam (Gallery Oldham); John Lavery, in the same year, called his Ariadne (1887, Private Collection). Steer’s bathers carry no such literary alibi. They were emphatically what they were: three young women on an English beach in summer light, requiring no modern concealment. The picture was conceptual rather than reportorial, a valiant attempt to marshal all advanced contemporary empirical and craft know-how on behalf of a grand idea, released from all literary sources. Three years later, in a much-cited Pall Mall Gazette dialogue between Walter Sickert and Francis Bate, Bate would object that a nude in the open English air must always be ‘an unnatural element in our grey English life’; only Degas, he conceded, was able to treat women ‘exactly as they are, bathing and dressing’ (X, ‘The Gospel of Impressionism, A Conversation between Two Impressionists and a Philistine’, Pall Mall Gazette, 21 July 1890, pp. 1-2). Steer, while Bate was still framing the question, had already demonstrated otherwise, and on an empathic scale.

The most intensely wrought of Steer’s paintings to date emerged from the Addison Road studio across the winter of 1887–8, where having the picture before him constantly allowed a level of sustained pictorial concentration impossible at the easel out of doors. Brushstrokes, particularly in the foreground, are broken over one another to convey, by a single set of touches, both the textures of sand and the temperature of flesh; the standing figure resolves into a luminous pool of cream and rose against the cerulean tidal sweep beyond. Degas once remarked that painting was the art of surrounding a piece of Indian red by such a colour as to make it appear vermillion, a maxim Steer intuitively grasped. Scale alone suggests that A Summer’s Evening was a machin de Salon to vie with the work of Seurat, an artist whose current painting he can scarcely have known. Bruce Laughton’s later formulation, ‘an amalgam of Impressionist techniques with a set-piece subject’, aptly framed his approach.

When the picture appeared in April 1888 at the third New English Art Club, the response was, by any reading, hostile. The widely syndicated ‘Penelope’ column found ‘the utter unnaturalness and audacity of Mr Wilson Steer’s Summer Evening’ so disturbing that she vowed never again to visit an exhibition containing ‘works of the Impressionist School’. The Illustrated London News reduced the picture to its component pigments and decided that Steer believed ‘squeezing a tube of colour on to a canvas’ was enough to make a painting; The Morning Post conceded only that the canvas could ‘be seen properly at the end of the gallery’. The Magazine of Art, almost alone in attempting a defence, allowed that Steer had ‘a distinct purpose’ which he ‘pursues with so much pluck that he deserves success’. The provincial press, syndicated from London by ‘Penelope’ and her colleagues, carried the controversy from the Moray Firth to Gravesend. The British matron, the Belfast Newsletter reported, ‘denounces these figures in language more vigorous than classical’.

‘They said I was wild’, Steer told an interviewer years later (MacColl, 1945, p. 121), but for him, there was no going back. The painting’s rescue came not from London but from Brussels. At some point that summer, the painter received an invitation, very probably through the Anglo-Belgian painter Alfred William Finch, to send the work to the next exhibition of Les XX. Hung in February 1889 alongside Seurat’s Les Poseuses (1887, Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia), A Summer’s Evening drew enthusiastic notices in Indépendance Belge and Le Courrier de l’Escaut, the latter establishing the comparison that has proved most durable: ‘Quelle flambée de soleil! … Des parallèles ne manqueront pas de s’établir entre les Baigneuses de Steer et les Poseuses de Seurat.’ (What a burst of sunshine! … Parallels will undoubtedly be drawn between Steer's Baigneusesand Seurat's Poseuses.) Steer was the only British artist invited back to Brussels twice in 1891 and 1893, the first as a feature showing of nine pictures.

Where Seurat insisted on system, Steer worked with a softer and more allusive touch – in short, a realm of Luxe, Calme et Volupté, where resonances with Charles Baudelaire and Henri Matisse in the wider context suddenly seem apposite. Were there to be a refrain to accompany A Summer’s Evening it would surely be that from the French poet’s L’Invitation aux Voyage. Were there to be a successor to the British painter’s experiment with Neo-Impressionism, it might well be Matisse’s aberration of 1904.

The picture remained in Steer’s studio for the rest of his life. By his death in 1942 the Bloomsbury orthodoxy associated with Roger Fry and Clive Bell had begun to write his most radical period out of the British modernist account, where it was to remain for two decades. The perspicacious Helen and Frederick Lessore of the Beaux Arts Gallery rescued the canvas at the Christie’s studio sale of 16 July 1942, where it was offered as Three Bathers on the Sands, and passed it to their client Henry Talbot de Vere Clifton (1907–1979) of Lytham Hall, one of Evelyn Waugh’s reputed models for Sebastian Flyte. Following the Cliftons’ moves, the canvas was placed on long loan to the Foreign Office in Whitehall, where, hanging in plain sight, it was rediscovered in the early 1960s by a young Slade student named Bruce Laughton (1928-2016), who began the modern reassessment of the artist. Laughton’s monograph of 1971 inaugurated that revival, and the painting was sold through Sotheby’s later that year. It was unavailable for the major Impressionism in Britainexhibition at the Barbican in 1995, where its centrality could easily have been demonstrated.

A Summer’s Evening is the first painting by a British artist to undertake, on the European scale and on European terms, the synthesis of Divisionist colour theory with the high tradition of the female nude that the rest of the avant-garde was still circling. It remains the work of a young painter who was demonstrably dans le mouvement, at a time when most of his British contemporaries were scarcely aware of the impact it would have: a feat of insight, instinct, intuition or genius that we have barely begun to understand.

We are grateful to Professor Kenneth McConkey for his research, contributions, and assistance with this essay.