Under the Trees

Under the Trees, painted in 1908 and now in the Brooklyn Museum, represents Steer at his most Constablian — placing figures in a leafy English landscape where dappled light and tree shade create the chromatic complexity that he had come to favour in his late middle period. The Brooklyn Museum acquisition is notable as evidence of American institutional interest in British Impressionism, a movement that had never commanded the same transatlantic attention as its French counterpart. Under the Trees shows Steer working with the tradition of English plein-air landscape — Constable, Cox, De Wint — reinterpreted through a Post-Impressionist colour awareness that allowed him to see the multiple greens, yellows, and ochres in dappled sunlight more analytically than his predecessors. His membership in the New English Art Club and his friendship with Walter Sickert and D.S. MacColl situated him within the critical mainstream of progressive British painting at this date.

Dappled light under trees was among the most technically demanding subjects in plein-air painting, requiring the painter to observe and render the constantly shifting pattern of sunlit patches and cool green shadow simultaneously. Steer addressed this by working the canvas as a mosaic of colour spots rather than modelling individual forms — the Impressionist approach applied to an English pastoral subject. Greens are varied from warm yellow-green in sunlit leaves to cool blue-green in deep shade.