Provenance:
Geoffrey Blackwell, OBE (1884-1943), then by descent

Exhibited:
London, National Portrait Society, Inaugural Exhibition, January 1911

Literature:
'National Portrait Society: A Representative Display', London Evening Standard, 20 January 1911, p. 7
'National Portrait Society', Daily News, 21 January 1911, p. 7
'National Portrait Society', Manchester Courier, 21 January 1911, p. 6
Lewis Hind, 'A Peep at the latest Portrait Exhibition', The Daily Chronicle, 21 January 1911, p. 6
'National Portrait Society', The Daily Telegraph, 25 January 1911, p. 15
'Art', Ladies' Pictorial, 28 January 1911, p. 134
Martin Hardie, 'The World of Art: The National Portrait Society', The Queen, The Lady's Paper, 28 January 1911, p. 173
'Art', Truth, 1 February 1911, p. 42
'Artists at work and play at the Grafton Galleries', The Sphere, 4 February 1911, p. 98
Laurence Binyon, 'Portraits and Sculpture', The Saturday Review, 11 February 1911, p. 171
JB Manson, 'Mr Geoffrey Blackwell's Collection of Modern Pictures', The Studio, vol 61, 1914, p. 282
DS MacColl, Life, Work and Setting of Philip Wilson Steer, 1945 (Faber and Faber), p. 213
Bruce Laughton, Philip Wilson Steer, 1971, (Oxford, Clarendon Press), p. 82, 149, (no.452), illus fig. 149

Catalogue note by Kenneth McConkey:

In the run up to Christmas 1910, London reeled at the scandal produced by Roger Fry’s exhibition, Manet and the Post-Impressionists, at the Grafton Gallery. There had been shows of Impressionist painting before, but these ‘Post-Impressionists’, who included Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, were outrageous. The press had a field-day and Henry Tonks counselled his students at the Slade School of Fine Art not to attend. When the works were taken down in the third week of January 1911, they were replaced by those of members of the National Portrait Society holding its inaugural exhibition. Here it seemed, public and critics were on safer ground, sanity was restored, and the madness of Cezanne and Van Gogh was dispelled. While it would be easy today, to take sides, the British portrait painters’ show should not be simply dismissed. Contemporary critics regarded works by Whistler and Watts, in one instance, dating back to 1840, with respect, as they enthused over Sargent’s Lady Agnew (National Gallery of Scotland), a work that looked back some eighteen years to his best period. Among the more challenging contemporary pieces by Lavery, Philpot and Orpen, was Philip Wilson Steer’s recent portrait of Mrs Geoffrey Blackwell, a painting different in style from those of his younger contemporaries - ‘attractive in its airiness’ and ‘extremely fresh and graceful …’. [1] The great erstwhile British Impressionist, had taken a new turn and in the words of one reviewer,

The scrupulously careful painting of the flesh suggests that Mr Steer is genuinely imbued with Pre-Raphaelitism. [2]

It was clear nonetheless that in painting his atmospheric background, Steer had not wholly rejected Impressionism, but like Manet, an artist who had fascinated him since his student days in Paris, he would apply a selective focus in the characterisation of sitters. This was true as much in classic figure studies such as A Girl in Blue (Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin) as in the present work, in which the head and hands of the sitter are drawn with great care. [3] Like the landscape backdrop in Mrs Violet Hammersley (fig 1), we can assume that the cliffs, sea and grassy bank in the present work were added in the studio. [4]

Technical challenges aside, Mrs Geoffrey Blackwell, was painted between the final months of 1909 and January 1911, and it would come to affirm an enduring friendship. [5] That year, on 22 April, four months after his engagement had been announced, Thomas Geoffrey Blackwell, heir to the Crosse and Blackwell food manufacturing company, read Charles Holmes’s review of Steer’s exhibition at the Goupil Gallery in The Times. [6] Such was the writer’s enthusiasm that Blackwell was prompted to visit the Regent Street gallery, make two purchases, and an intimate friendship with the painter that lasted throughout the rest of their lives was the result. [7] This painter-and-patron relationship blossomed in the months after Blackwell’s marriage to Shirley Maud Lawson-Johnston of Beckett House, Shrivenham in Berkshire, on 5 October 1909. [8] Although Blackwell was to purchase important works by Tonks, Orpen, Clausen, Sargent, John, Philpot and others, his closest confidante and frequent house-guest was Steer. In the years leading up to the Great War, Steer would regularly describe his summer painting campaigns to Blackwell, as he toured the Home Counties, the Cotswolds and East Anglia in search of landscape motifs. [9]

Laughton correctly points to the high Victorian revivalism of the young Mrs Blackwell’s attire and looks back to the grand manner portraiture of Mrs Violet Hammersley. [10] Aileen Ribeiro delves more deeply, recalling the association George Moore in Steer’s confection of this particular sitter. Fashion, she concludes ‘is Protean’ in its ability to rework styles from different eras – hence ‘Gainsborough of the 1780s’ can be satisfactorily combined with distinct references to the rounded shapes ‘of the mid-nineteenth century’. [11] The result, for several contemporary writers was ‘pretty’ – a word that for Lewis Hind, writing in the Daily Chronicle ‘is the favourite adjective among artists this season’ and was being deployed no doubt to distinguish their aesthetic probity in stark contrast to the crudity of characterisation one might have found in the previous month in Matisse. [12] It was left to Laurence Binyon to point out that Steer had taken ‘a landscape view of portraiture’ in which the sitter’s personality is not permitted to dominate the ensemble. [13] While Shirley Maud Blackwell has charm and presence, she was, in other words, no grande dame. Laughton also makes useful comparisons between the present work and the small oil study (fig 2) which lacks both the depth of characterisation and the ‘airiness’ of the present finished version.

While in general terms we might confirm Steer’s and Tonks’s frequent recourse to the well-springs of English Art in the face of Roger Fry’s Post-Impressionism, there were hurdles to overcome in the fancies of eighteenth-century portraiture recycled through the filters of Victorian illustration. Where Tonks often faltered in paintings of this kind, Steer succeeded, as his treatment of the present fresh-faced ingénue demonstrates. Dressed à la Tissot for a warm summer’s day, a straw picture hat frames her face, and as in Gainsborough’s celebrated portrait of his daughters, a butterfly flits through the grass at her side sprinkling fairy dust. From pictures like this younger Jazz Age portraitists such as Ambrose McEvoy took note.

The blond harmonies of the rococo are reimagined and irradiate from Mrs Blackwell’s restraining presence and this, more than any other single instance, confirmed that path of ‘the newcomer’ collector and placed him, according to James Bolivar Manson, before the artist’s ‘more important and ambitious efforts’. [14]

Kenneth McConkey 2017 amended 2025

[1] ‘National Portrait Society: A Representative Display’, Evening Standard, 20 January 1911, p. 7; ‘Artists at work and play at the Grafton Galleries’, The Sphere, 4 February 1911, p. 6.

[2] ‘National Portrait Society’, Daily News, 21 January 1911, p. 7.

[3] ‘Mr Steer’s Girl in Blue’, The Art Journal, 1911, p. 55.

[4] Laughton, 1971, p. 81-2; Kenneth McConkey, Edwardian Portraits, Images of an Age of Opulence, 1986, (Antique Collectors’ Club), p. 175.

[5] The picture is dated 1911, and catalogued as such by Laughton 1971, (no 452), however, since the National Portrait Society show opened at the end of January 1911, it is likely the work was actually painted in the preceding year and dated as it left the artist’s studio. This is confirmed in a letter to Blackwell dated 26 December 1909 in which Steer states ‘I shall be pleased to undertake it and do my best to make a success of it.’ (London, British Library, MS add 46193). I am grateful to Francesca Walsh for this important reference.

[6] Blackwell (1884-1943) was the son of Thomas Francis Blackwell, one half of the food manufacturing company, Crosse and Blackwell. At the time when Geoffrey Blackwell entered the company in 1905, it was the largest producer of tinned and bottled produce in Britain. Blackwell inherited his collecting instincts from his father, a client of Agnew’s.

[7] JB Manson ‘Mr Geoffrey Blackwell’s Collection of Modern Pictures’. The Studio, vol 61, 1914, p. 271, indicates that Blackwell ‘felt an intenser quality of light and air’ in Steer’s work than in ‘the ordinary paintings … decorating the drawing rooms of Mayfair with their empty triviality’. It was at this point that his wife’s portrait was added to ‘the remarkable number of the finer paintings of Mr Wilson Steer’, in the growing collection.

[8] Shirley Maud Lawson-Johnston (1889-1943) had three sons and two daughters – all sketched as babies by Henry Tonks.

[9] See for instance DS MacColl, 1945, pp. 77, 92-3.

[10] Laughton, 1971, p. 82.

[11] Aileen Ribeiro in A Flair for Fashion, 2017, p. 35.

[12] Lewis Hind, ‘A Peep at the latest Portrait Exhibition’, The Daily Chronicle, 21 January 1911, p. 6. Charles Lewis Hind, (1862-1927), was a distinguished author and art critic, writing for The Studio and The Daily Chronicle.

[13] Laurence Binyon, ‘Portraits and Sculpture’, The Saturday Review, 11 February 1911, p. 171. Binyon (1869-1943) was a distinguished poet, art historian and keeper of Oriental Prints at the British Museum.

[14] Manson, 1914, p. 271. Manson (1879-1945), a Paris-trained British Impressionist, would go on to become Director of the Tate Gallery in 1930.

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