Sailing Boats

Sailing Boats, dating to around 1901 and executed on paper, represents the more informal, plein-air practice that Steer maintained alongside his studio canvases throughout his career. The Sarjeant Gallery in Whanganui, New Zealand, received this work through the dispersal of British art into Commonwealth collections in the early twentieth century. Sailing boats were a recurrent subject for Steer, who painted them at Walberswick, Chepstow, and various southern English coastal locations, always attracted by the combination of reflective water, atmospheric sky, and the dynamic but not over-dramatic forms of working and pleasure craft under sail. Works on paper allowed a freshness and spontaneity that Steer's more laboured canvases sometimes lost, and the surviving body of his works on paper shows his Impressionist sensibility at its most direct and unconditional.

Oil or watercolour on paper allowed Steer to work with a speed and directness that canvas preparation inhibited, and the texture of the paper contributed its own surface quality to the work. Sailing boat forms — their geometry of hull, mast, and sail — required decisive mark-making to suggest structure while keeping the handling consistent with the atmospheric looseness of sky and water treatment. Reflections of hulls in water are typically handled with vertical strokes of slightly darkened hull colour.