International studio (15.1901/1902(1902))

The New English Art Club

what sort of a distance, other than an advance in
that mastery which makes paint speak, separates
The Rainbow of this exhibition from the early
Walls of Montreux—these are questions which
must be left to the occasion when Mr. Steer
shall get together for us a collection of the work
he has done. Meanwhile there is this to be said
for those who find the changes from one picture
to another radical : the pictures are, if we may use
the expression, in themselves radical. Each one
as it came before us gave the impression of having
been painted with a whole heart—freely from the
bottom, as it were—with nothing affected or wilful
intervening; and if one remarks differences between
pictures which have that depth and directness, it
is natural, if not logical, to conclude that the
differences must also be fundamental.

It would be less surprising to meet variety in a
painter whose work had all along revealed the
character of facility, and whose source of inspiration
seemed to be pictures rather than the appearances
of nature. But the
fluency of The Rainbow,
the eager run of touches
astonishingly just, the dig-
nity, the deep brilliance
and the stillness with which
the river glows beneath us
in the sudden break of
sunshine—here is a power
of expression which, on the
face of it, the painter has
won and not slipped into.

Nor did this painter’s handi-
work at any time seem light
of achievement, or .pro-
duced without an ever
more and more practised
concentration of energy.

There is a sharpness in
Mr. Steer’s work, an edge,
and an eagerness, that
mate not at all with the
idea of facility.

Neither has Mr. Steer’s
work looked as if its source
were in other pictures
rather than in the world as
we can see it, and do see
it, at this moment. In
what he produces there is
a vigour and a happi-
ness that are the very
note of the smart per- “a window in a London street”
264

sonal contact between vision and the medium.
Even the pictures which were held to show
plainly the influence of Monet or Manet, to take
an instance, had the hand and the eye of the
artist in them, active and full of life. The
spectator felt none of the despondency that flows
from borrowed work, as from a charge brought
in our very faces against the day in which we live.
Indeed, their newness is exactly one of the surprises
of Mr. Steer’s pictures. If one thinks of Constable
when one sees The Rainbow in the present exhibi-
tion, that is rather because the mind must travel back
—over much beautiful landscape—still back to
Constable before it meet again the grand, unmoved
landscape, the picture in which the action of the
natural scene has been so realised that it can be
projected whole, severed from this or that tie of
sentiment, and left, almost coldly, to speak to the
spectator ot such things as he has ears to hear.
The French romantic painters of landscape, and
Cecil Lawson with his fellows in England, had a

BY w. ORPEN