SUMMER PICNIC, EVENING NEAR BRIDGENORTH
signed P.W. Steer lower left
oil on panel
25.5 x 35cm; 10 x 13 3/4in
42.5 x 51.5cm; 16 3/4 x 20 1/4in (framed)

Property from the Estate of a Gentleman

Provenance
Charles A. Jackson, Manchester (by June 1941)
Mr O. Hughes-Jones, Bury

Exhibited
Birkenhead, Williamson Art Gallery, Festival of Britain: Wilson Steer Exhibition, 1951
Manchester, County Borough of Bury Art Gallery, Steer, Sickert, Epstein, 1954
Leicestershire Museums and Art Galleries (on loan from 1975)

Scenes around Bridgenorth recur in Steer's work from the 1910s onwards when he shared a studio there with his painter friends Fred Brown and William Coles. By then Steer's style had graduated away from the impressionistic style he had developed in Paris and practiced on his return to London in 1884 when he painted in Walberswick and co-founded the New English Art Club. Instead, as Professor of Painting at the Slade School of Art (1893-1930) he looked to English precedents, notably Gainsborough, Turner and Constable, the last of these giants of British painting clearly evident in the present work. Teaching alongside Brown and Henry Tonks at the Slade, Steer influenced the next generation of painters, amongst them David Bomberg (lot 56), Mark Gertler, Augustus and Gwen John, Winifred Knights, William Orpen, William Roberts, Stanley Spencer and Percy Wyndham Lewis.