Lot Essay
In the early years of the twentieth-century, the New English Art Club had the competitive edge in British Art. Some reviewers looked to Augustus John, others to William Orpen, while in the winter of 1904, John Singer Sargent was noteworthy. But in the words of Haldane Macfall, for the ‘sweet sense of the freshness of colour, the rich sense of artistry’ one looked first and foremost to Philip Wilson Steer (‘The New English Art Club’, The Academy and Literature, 19 November 1904, p. 427). This artist had been one of the club’s founding exhibitors, and according to one reviewer, on entering the exhibition, one found the present picture in a place of honour. Steer’s followers had seen him show naturalistic and Impressionist works, modern portraits and ballet scenes, and more recently had pursued him into eighteenth-century reveries, following the picturesque tour and confronting the ‘august sites’ of Turner’s Liber Studiorum. There was no doubt in November 1904 that his recent visit to Hawes in north Yorkshire had yielded striking results and for the poet and critic, Arthur Symons, his The Storm, Hawes, Yorkshire (Horses Racing), was, ‘… by far the finest of the three pictures which he exhibits, and in the fierce sky and suddenly revealed foreground, in the lonely and resistant tree standing like a tower on the edge of the thunder-cloud, there is a sense of awe, a rendering of the temperament and not only the texture of a landscape, which is remarkable in his work.’
Symons ranged over the other works, discussing Twilight, ‘a landscape against a warm sky’, and concluded that ‘it reveals no individuality, is no new reading of nature, as The Storm, in its own way, certainly is’. Although he struggled to express it, the picture was worthy of no conventional eulogy. Its visionary zeal was expressed in that moment when, perhaps frightened by the sudden crash of thunder, a mare and foal - ‘impressionist horses’ in the words of another reviewer – run wildly across a meadow that eerily glows against an inky sky. Presently the clouds will burst.
Other descriptions concurred; in Steer, English painting was rediscovering its golden age. For many years the picture retained its appeal and was vividly recalled by James Laver in 1925. ‘Who’, he declared, ‘having once seen it, or even seen a reproduction of it, does not remember the magnificent painting called The Storm? Who has not been fascinated by the bright, unnatural sunshine of the foreground (unnatural as a real storm seems to be); the dimly seen scampering horses, the dark blue shadows of the heart of the storm far in the distance and in the torn sky a ragged patch of clear-blue green beyond the broken fragments of the clouds’ (J. Lever, op. cit., pp. 78-9).
This was a painting that gave Steer ‘an opportunity to exploit his most significant power – that of grasping … a vast tract of country, a whole range of landscape, within the compass of his mental vision, and of transferring it to canvas … with a heightening of its emotional effect’ (J. Lever, op. cit., p. 81).
Steer’s fussiness was legendary. Painting nature he must find the right spot. Sudden draughts were his enemy and on these expeditions he was continually cosseted by colleagues and friends. At this moment of calm before the storm, their respect for the master of the English landscape was not misplaced. In the Steer oeuvre, The Storm is exceptional.
KMc.
Symons ranged over the other works, discussing Twilight, ‘a landscape against a warm sky’, and concluded that ‘it reveals no individuality, is no new reading of nature, as The Storm, in its own way, certainly is’. Although he struggled to express it, the picture was worthy of no conventional eulogy. Its visionary zeal was expressed in that moment when, perhaps frightened by the sudden crash of thunder, a mare and foal - ‘impressionist horses’ in the words of another reviewer – run wildly across a meadow that eerily glows against an inky sky. Presently the clouds will burst.
Other descriptions concurred; in Steer, English painting was rediscovering its golden age. For many years the picture retained its appeal and was vividly recalled by James Laver in 1925. ‘Who’, he declared, ‘having once seen it, or even seen a reproduction of it, does not remember the magnificent painting called The Storm? Who has not been fascinated by the bright, unnatural sunshine of the foreground (unnatural as a real storm seems to be); the dimly seen scampering horses, the dark blue shadows of the heart of the storm far in the distance and in the torn sky a ragged patch of clear-blue green beyond the broken fragments of the clouds’ (J. Lever, op. cit., pp. 78-9).
This was a painting that gave Steer ‘an opportunity to exploit his most significant power – that of grasping … a vast tract of country, a whole range of landscape, within the compass of his mental vision, and of transferring it to canvas … with a heightening of its emotional effect’ (J. Lever, op. cit., p. 81).
Steer’s fussiness was legendary. Painting nature he must find the right spot. Sudden draughts were his enemy and on these expeditions he was continually cosseted by colleagues and friends. At this moment of calm before the storm, their respect for the master of the English landscape was not misplaced. In the Steer oeuvre, The Storm is exceptional.
KMc.