Provenance:
Private Collection, Thomas Humphry Ward Esq.(1845-1926), Art critic for the Times Newspaper
Private Collection, Mrs. Sandwith
Private Collection, Adrian McConnel
Thence by descent

Exhibited:
London, The Goupil Gallery, Exhibition of Paintings by P. Wilson Steer, February 1894, no. 1, as 'property of T Humphrey Ward Esq.'

Literature:
'Our London Correspondence', Glasgow Herald, 26 February 1894, p. 7
'From Private Correspondence', The Scotsman, 26 February 1894, p. 7
'From our London Correspondent', Manchester Courier, 26 February 1894, p. 5 'Exhibitions', Pall Mall Gazette, 27 February 1894, p. 3
'Exhibition Review, A Modern Painter', The National Observer, 3 March 1894, p. 396
G[eorge] M[oore], 'Mr Steer's Exhibition', The Speaker, 3 March 1894, p. 250
'Art: The Goupil Gallery', Weekly Dispatch, 4 March 1894, p. 6
'Studio and Gallery', Black and White, 10 March 1894, p. 294
'Fine Art: The Goupil', The Morning Post, 10 March 1894, p. 2
George Moore, Modern Painting, 1898 (Walter Scott), p. 242
DS MacColl, Life, Work and Setting of Philip Wilson Steer, 1945 (Faber & Faber), pp. 51, 193
Bruce Laughton, Philip Wilson Steer, 1971 (Clarendon Press, Oxford), p.130, (no 52)

Sketches for the present work are included in Steer's sketchbook inscribed Boulogne and dated 1888. The sketchbook is held in the V&A archives under reference E 281 - 1943.

Had you been standing on the upper deck of the Folkestone steamer, steering into the harbour at Boulogne-sur-Mer at the turn of the twentieth century, your view on the port side, beyond the guard rail of the jetée de l'est, would take in the plage, and the Second Empire Casino. Sitting in public gardens that contained a saltwater bathing establishment, the lines of the casino prepared you for those of the great exhibition 'palaces' of Paris, a train ride away. A quick scan of your Baedeker would tell you that the casino opened every year for the summer season from 15 June to 15 October and a day ticket would cost you two francs. Since the lights are on in Philip Wilson Steer's view of the building, we can assume that the present canvas must represent a late summer evening. Although dated '92' we know that the painter spent the summer at Cowes in that year. He would have passed through Boulogne in 1887, 1888 and 1889, producing swift sketchbook notes, three of which relate directly to the present work (fig 1).

Why, in the 1880s was Boulogne and its environs so admired, and why did it supplant Walberswick in Steer's affections? The answers are various - Dannes, Étaples, Montreuil and one or two other picturesque towns nearby were supporting small colonies of British and American painters, many of whom were working in loosely Impressionist styles, while further down the coast there were the familiar haunts of Monet and Boudin. Boulogne was also one of the main points of access to Paris in the late nineteenth century, its packet-boat service having commenced in 1849.
In Steer's case the specific interest in Boulogne is likely to have come first from the early work of Manet that he saw in the artist's posthumous retrospective exhibition in Paris in 1884. 'When the Manet exhibition was held', he told John Rothenstein, 'I had never heard his name. But I went and was very much interested ...The landscapes I liked very much ...' Manet had of course visited Boulogne several times in the 1860s and on one occasion on the plage, had painted the twin piers that form the harbour entrance. Fashionable promenades, these breakwaters with their white handrails had not changed when Steer painted them twenty years later.

Passing through the port in the late 1880s, and again in 1891, Steer must have realized that he needed to go no further for one of the most celebrated British Impressionist paintings, Boulogne Sands. Having already painted this beach, looking north to where the hillside rolls gently towards the shore in Boulogne Sands: Children Shrimping, the Casino waterfront was a key location.

There is sufficient technical variation between the Tate and Ferens canvases to leave the precise date of most works ascribed to the artist's Boulogne corpus prior to 1891, open to debate. While he was known to be capable of working in several different styles at once, the dabs and dashes of a painting of girls busily building sandcastles on a blustery day, contrast with the serenity of the present townscape - a work that takes the eye beyond the casino to the rising land of the haute ville, and the tower of the Cathédral Notre Dame. At this moment when the noisy children have gone and the casino slowly becomes incandescent, the town sinks into the crepuscular light of evening.

Bruce Laughton, Steer's 1960s champion, had not seen the present painting when writing his monograph, and accepted DS MacColl's earlier assessment of it. Recalling the painting in the 1940s and thinking of the celebrated 'nocturnes' of the 1870s, MacColl had reached for the word 'Whistlerian'. It now seems most likely that the artist post-dated Casino, Boulogne '92' at the time it left his studio and when it was recalled for his solo exhibition in 1894, it had passed into the collection of Thomas Humphry Ward (1845-1926), the principal art critic and occasional leader writer on the staff of The Times.

Ward apparently 'disliked that it should be known' that he was the painting's owner. George Moore was keen to make something of the fact and in praising the painting he also exposed its purchaser to a wider readership:

I like ... The Casino, Boulogne, the property, I note with some interest, of Mr T Humphry Ward, art critic of The Times ... Mr Humphry Ward must write conventional commonplace, otherwise he could not remain art critic of The Times, so it is pleasant to find that he is withal an excellent judge of a picture ... The buildings stand high up, they are piled up in the picture, and a beautiful blue envelopes sky, sea, and land. Nos 1 [the present picture] and 2 show Mr Steer at his best: that beautiful blue, that beautiful mauve, is the optimism of painting, is the peculiar characteristic of Mr Steer's work.

Other critics concurred, referring to its 'perfect technique' and the 'decorative charm' of its colour.
Painted 'freely and flowingly', the peacefulness of this evening on the French coast was conveyed with splendid spontaneity. It had, more than the overtly 'Impressionist' studies of 1891, a 'unity of vision' that Steer considered one of the essential 'laws' of good painting. He insisted, echoing Whistler, that scenes like that of the casino, may be 'commonplace and ordinary' to the layperson, but it was for the painter to find beauty in them. As one pulled into the harbour of an evening, this called for the subtle palette of warm greys and ochres of a hillside and buildings that surround the ghostly gaming house, framed between the hints of mauve in a peaceful sky and the cool cerulean blues of a rippling tide.

Kenneth McConkey

References

1. Karl Baedeker, Northern France, 1909 ed., (Leipzig), p. 7. The building, although requisitioned as a military hospital in the Great War, was destroyed in an allied bombing raid to knock out the port in the Second World War.
2. Laughton, on the basis of drawings in the V&A sketchbook, (1942-E281, fig 1), assigns Casino, Boulogne to 1888-9. The sketchbook was however, dated 1888-9 by Ronald Gray, who was not part of Steer's entourage in the late 1880s, so this alone may not rule out a slightly earlier date.
3. John KM Rothenstein, A Pot of Paint, The Artists of the 1890s, 1929 (Freeport, New York reprint, 1973), pp. 138-9
4. Manet's The Jetty of Boulogne-sur-Mer, 1869 (fig 2) was exhibited in his posthumous retrospective at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in January 1884, no. 51.
5. For Steer's 1891 oils sketches, see Bruce Laughton, 'Some Early Panel-sketches by Philip Wilson Steer', Apollo, June 1966, pp. 49-55. When shown in his London exhibition in February 1894, there had been no recorded visits to the French port between 1891 and the summer of 1894. The artist is likely nevertheless, to have referred to the drawings when painting the present picture. Although technically possible, Casino, Boulogne is unlikely to have been painted on the motif, and if that is the case the date range could well be extended, with 1892 not being impossible.
6. As stated, Laughton 1971, p. 50, places the work c.1888/9. A case could be made for the preceding year.
7. DS MacColl, 'Steer', Artwork, no. 17, Spring 1929, p. 16. MacColl 1945, p. 193, had nevertheless retained the picture as a work of 1892.
8. Ibid
9. G[eorge] M[oore], 'Mr Steer's Exhibition', The Speaker, 3 March 1894, p. 250, reprinted in Moore 1898, p. 242. The painting was actually listed in the 1894 catalogue of Steer's exhibition as from Ward's collection.
10. 'From our London Correspondent', Manchester Courier, 26 February 1894, p. 5; 'Exhibitions', Pall Mall Gazette, 27 February 1894, p. 3.
11. 'Art: The Goupil Gallery', Weekly Dispatch, 4 March 1894, p. 6; 'Fine Art: The Goupil', The Morning Post, 10 March 1894, p. 2.
12. In 1891, in an address to the members of the Art Workers' Guild, he railed against those who packed their paintings with such detail that they became 'tiresome exercises of misguided industry', see Philip Wilson Steer, 'Mr P Wilson Steer on Impressionism in Art', Appendix D in DS MacColl, Life, Work & Setting of Philip Wilson Steer, 1945 (Faber & Faber, London), p. 177 where the text appears in full.

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Tuesday 11 July 2023 | 1pm BST
Donnington Priory, Newbury, Berkshire RG14 2JE

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