Flying Kites (Sketch for Bourton House Decorations)

Flying Kites (Sketch for Bourton House Decorations), painted in 1902, documents Philip Wilson Steer's engagement with domestic architectural decoration — a significant strand of late Victorian and Edwardian artistic practice in which painters were commissioned to create integrated decorative schemes for private houses. Bourton House, a country house in Gloucestershire, received a series of decorative paintings from Steer at this period, representing one of the more substantial applied commissions in his career. The subject of kite-flying children in a landscape carries the lightness and summery animation appropriate to domestic decoration — cheerful without narrative complexity, warm without sentimentality. The National Galleries Scotland holding of this sketch situates it within the documentation of Steer's working method, showing how he developed compositions in sketch form before executing the final decorative works. Steer was by this period a leading figure in British Impressionism through his work with the New English Art Club.

A decorative sketch of this kind would have been executed with a view to translating the composition to a larger scale and potentially different medium in the final scheme. The paint handling is consequently freer and more gestural than in Steer's exhibition canvases, with the broad tonal relationships clearly established but details left suggestive. The sky and open landscape are particularly freely handled, consistent with Constable-derived English landscape practice.