Philip Wilson Steer Young Woman on Walberswick Pier c.1887

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About the artist

PHILIP WILSON STEER (1891-1959)

PHILIP WILSON STEER was born at Birkenhead on 28 December 1860, the son of Philip Steer, a painter of portraits and teacher of painting. He studied drawing and painting at the school of art at Gloucester but failed to gain entrance to the Academy Schools. He went instead to Paris in 1882 and studied at the Beaux Arts.

One unusual introduction to the artist who was perhaps the greatest English impressionist is contained in Maggie Hemingway’s, The Bridge. As Hemingway writes in the note that prefaces her novel:

In 1884, having completed his studies in Paris, the painter Philip Wilson Steer made for Walberswick, a tiny village on the Suffolk coast. Until 1887 he spent every summer there alone, formulating his own style of English impressionism. In 1888 he persuaded a painter friend, Fred Brown, to join him, and by 1889 their visit to Walberswick was sandwiched in between trips to Montreuil-sur-Mer and Boulogne . They visited Walberswick briefly for the last time in 1891. After that Steer’s summers were always spent in the company of other painters, journeying all over Britain in search of suitable painting places. His style too seemed to change: he never again painted with the same vitality and freshness as he did in the Walberswick years. Was it possible that he just became tired of this beautiful place? Or did something else make Walberswick unbearable for him?

The Bridge is based on the speculation that, on one of his early visits to Walberswick, Steer met and fell in love with a married woman and that it was this forbidden (and unconsummated) love that both inspired him and, eventually, left him desolate.

The novel had a curious sequel. When it was eventually turned into a film in 1992, with David O’Hara and Saskia Reeves playing the leading roles in a story markedly more passionate than that of the original novel, Maggie Hemingway attended the premiere. Here she was surprised to be introduced to a young man who bore a striking resemblance to Wilson Steer as he appeared in his own self-portraits. It transpired that this young man and his sister, who was also at the premiere, were Steer’s illegitimate great-grandchildren and were descended from a woman with whom he had an affair during the same period in which Maggie Hemingway had set her novel. Although there was apparently no connection with Walberswick, fiction had on this occasion come strikingly close to real life.