ART.
MR. WILSON' STEER'S PICTURES AT THE GOUPIL GALLERY.
AT least. Mr. Steer is exhilarating. How often do we corns away from a "one-man show" nowadays with a feeling of fatigue I Notwithstanding'onr desire to be in sympathy with some artists, and although we may admire their work when we have made the necessary effort to understand them, the final reward of pleasure is insufficient to make us forget this effort, however much interested we may be. Mr. Steer's pictures, on the other hand, seem to Come half-way to meet us, seem to take it upon themselves to show off their beauties.
On entering the rooms in which they are shown, almost before we have had time to be conscious of any one individual picture, we become aware of an atmosphere of pure, almost physical, pleasure. No great intellectual struggle, we feel, is before us, no new conception of existence to be understood, to be brought into focus, so to speak, with our own ; and on closer examination we find we have not been deceived, we basic in the delight of simply seeing. What an exceedingly difficult thing it is to see simply may not perhaps have struck everybody, and certainly looking at Mr. Steer's pictures will hardly make us conscious of the difficulty, for they almost delude one into thinking it must be the easiest thing in the world. To be extremely sensitive to the shapes and colours of objects, and at the same time to be able to forget what other people have made of them, would appear to be almost an impossibility., judging from the number of artists who seem able only to be inspired by scenes- that suggest a previous master's treatment: But of modern English painters, we think that Mr. Steer comes far the nearest to seeing Nature with a completely unaffected eye, and, what is more important for us, is able to express what he seen in .a masterly though subservient manner; Any one with a feeling for colour must be delighted with the portrait heads in this Exhibition, and any one interested in the technique of painting will find in nearly all, but especially in the magnificent Corfe Castle (No. 16), and in the sketches of landscapes, wonderful lessons in the use of pure colour,—colour used in the simplest way to express a great variety of natural effects, never to amaze us by virtuosity of handling. Let us not fall into the error of admiring these pictures because one reminds us of Constable, another of Rembrandt, and so on. Let us try to look at Mr. Steer's pictures with something of • the same spirit with which Mr. Steer looks at Nature. Then4 besides the intense pleasure they will give us, they may put us
into the way of seeing the world for ourselves., 0:
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