Art: Solid Citizen

Britons are proud of the well-ordered beauties of their countryside. In the grimy industrial town of Birkenhead (pop. 141,600) last week, a show of paintings by Native Son Philip Wilson Steer celebrated those beauties in a fashion strictly to English taste.

Impressionist Steer’s England is a frankly scenic place with rolling hills, verdant valleys, billowing clouds. At their best, his canvases, like those of Turner and Constable, give new life to familiar prospects, his watercolors catch fleeting tricks of sunlight and shadow with a few decisive strokes.

Like a Cricketer. Steer’s life was almost as untroubled as his landscapes. The son of a portraitist, he early decided on art for his own career. After working with his father, he attended art school in Gloucester, set out for Paris at 22. Wilson Steer was not impressed. He found Paris full of fleas and smelly streets, afterward dismissed the French countryside as “damn silly.” He did not bother to master the language or look into the brouhaha of impressionism that was turning French art topsy-turvy.

But back in London, he explored the milder forms of French impressionism, adopted what suited him. It was the English countryside and seashore that suited him best of all.

While such unconventional friends as Augustus John and Walter Sickert painted and blustered their way to colorful international reputations, Steer retired more & more into the quiet life of a successful painter-teacher. Hating anything that smacked of “artiness,” he wore stiff three-inch collars, dressed in Savile Row suits, ordered his life as rigidly as a banker’s clerk. “Painting,” he said, “is a job like any other, something one has to do between meals.”

Unlike his artistic hero Turner, who was content to sleep on tavern tables on his cross-country art hikes (and once had himself bound to a ship’s mast during a blizzard so he could observe the snow), Steer had a morbid fear of drafts, never went out in bad weather; on landscape sorties, he carried along a platform to keep his feet dry. To make sure of respectful treatment from train porters and inn servants, he lugged his painting gear in a cricketer’s bag.

Like a Horse. But there was nothing stuffy about Steer’s view of his place in art. He told friends, “I have a third-class mind,” answered praise by saying, “I muddle about and suppose something comes in the end.” Of portraits he said, “It is merely a matter of giving [the] sitter the right amount of points—like a horse, you know.” His own portraits lacked the distinction of his landscapes.

Scornful of watercolors at first (he called them “whoring,” compared to the “married state” of oil painting), he became increasingly fond of them as he grew older. But he still deprecated himself: “A watercolor is nearly always a fluke. If you go on doing them, flukes will happen a little oftener.”

By the time Steer died in 1942, his flukes, along with his solidly painted landscapes, had won him a reputation as one of England’s finest modern painters. Last week, with Birkonians flocking to the big Steer show, the borough council thought up a special way to show the city’s approval : they ordered a plaque for the old stone house where Wilson Steer was born.