Under the Trees

In the summer recess of 1908 Philip Wilson Steer arrived at the home of one of his Slade School students near Corfe in Dorset for his annual landscape painting campaign. Upon arrival he and two companions set off across the fields to the farm where they would be staying. For his hostess, Katherine Everett, this was ‘enchanting country’, overlooking the wide expanse of Poole harbour, ‘with its creeks and inlets and cloud shadows breaking the foreground of heathland and pines’. “I could paint here for ever” she reports the artist to have said ‘under his breath’.1
In this verdant alfresco setting Steer, his Slade colleagues, Henry Tonks and Fred Brown, and the Everetts would gather for picnic lunches – the subject of the present canvas. On only one occasion was Steer’s concentration disturbed by a frightening, but friendly, snake. Now in his late forties, the painter was hailed as one of the most important British Impressionists of his generation who, unlike George Clausen, remained the most revered New English Art Club rebel outside the Royal Academy. Ever experimental, his work had gone through many phases since those early years, and they are sometimes difficult to pin down. With Under the Trees there is, nevertheless, a fluency that must derive directly from the idyllic circumstances of its creation. When shown in Steer’s solo exhibition at the Goupil Gallery in the spring of 1909 it, and other recent landscapes were hailed as the work of ‘the great exponent of English landscape’.2
Confusion concerning the placing of Under the Trees within the oeuvre, and its original title, was created in 1923 when the canvas, not inappropriately, was captioned as The Picnic. Although he appears not to have known that the work had been donated to Brooklyn Museum, and that the original title had been restored in 1931, the Steer scholar, Bruce Laughton, on the basis of the 1923 illustration, ascribed it to 1904. This can now be discounted.
When shown in 1909, Steer’s close associate, Collins Baker, commented upon its ‘utmost vigour’ and ‘bright pigment’, concluding that ‘as a colourist Steer has no living rival’. At the same time, commenting on the acquisition of three larger pieces for the new Johannesburg Art Gallery, The Westminster Gazette asserted that painters would prefer the ‘singularly fresh and genuine’ smaller studies. Among these Under the Trees, in ‘the movement of light and foliage’, was a work ‘few living artists could excel’.3
Steer had not staged a solo exhibition since his classic Impressionist display of 1894. The 1909 show, while it celebrated an artist of strength and maturity, also demonstrated one who remained unfettered by formulae or convention.4 He retained his contact with the French masters visiting the Cezanne retrospective at the Salon d’Automne in 1907, but preferred the pre-constructive brushwork of the early 1870s to the later work.5 Under the Trees clearly confirms that Steer was unwilling to sacrifice the prevailing atmospherics of the Dorset coast to the systematic Cezanne-ist tache. As Christian Brinton, writing in Harper’s Monthly declared a few months after the exhibition’s closure, ‘fascinated by the possibilities of pigment...Mr Steer...approaches landscape [in a] blithe, unfettered spirit’. His specific mentors - Monticelli, Constable and Turner - were surpassed.6
We are grateful to Professor Kenneth McConkey for preparing this catalogue note and for his assistance in cataloguing this work.