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| Philip Wilson Steer Mrs Cyprian Williams and her Two Little Girls 1891 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
"Mrs. Williams was an artist who exhibited with Steer at the New English Art Club, and her husband T. Cyprian Williams was a collector of art. D.S. MacColl recalled that the portrait was commissioned by another artist friend of Steer's, Francis James. James owned the picture throughout his life, and it may be that it was painted at Steer's request, but that he needed the commission in order to be able to devote the time to it. The design of the portrait is unconventional in that the point of view looks downwards from one corner. Mrs. Williams is seen in profile, and her two daughters, placed on a bench that divides the picture diagonally, are seen from above. It is likely that Steer felt freer to be so unusual since the portrait was not commissioned by the sitter."
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| Philip Wilson Steer Model Seated before a Mirror ca. 1894 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
"In Britain, Steer pioneered the new French concept of painting naturalistic bedroom scenes of women dressing or washing. It was an approach derived from the paintings of Edgar Degas. This scene places the viewer in the role of voyeur, and the girl's absorption in her reflection echoes our own consideration of her. Intimate scenes such as this were bitterly denounced by critics for indecency."
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| Philip Wilson Steer Sleep ca. 1898 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
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| Walter Sickert Minnie Cunningham at the Old Bedford 1892 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
"In the 1880s popular music halls sprang up in London and Paris, and Impressionist artists such as Edgar Degas and Walter Sickert began to paint the audiences and acts. Minnie Cunningham was a successful performer whom Sickert admired. He first exhibited this picture with the subtitle 'I'm an old hand at love, though I'm young in years' – a quotation from one of her songs. "
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| Roderic O'Conor Still Life with Bottles 1892 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
"O'Conor grew up in Dublin, where he went to the Metropolitan School of Art. By 1888 he had moved to Paris, and was associated with the American painters studying there. Like them he visited Grez-sur-Loing to paint, and later went to Brittany for several summers. This still life is indebted to the intense colouring of Monet's later landscapes. Each area of the subject is painted as a pairing of separate colours."
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| Roderic O'Conor Red Roofs ca. 1894 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
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| George Clausen Brown Eyes 1891 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
"Clausen studied in France and painted open-air 'rural naturalist' subjects in an impressionist style. In 1886 he helped to found the New English Art Club as an alternative exhibition venue to the Royal Academy. This is a portrait of a local girl from the village of Cookham in Berkshire, where the artist was living. The delicate play of light across the model's features, together with the flicked brushwork in the background, suggest both the freshness and transience of youth."
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| Henry Scott Tuke Mrs Florence Humphris 1892 oil on panel Tate Gallery |
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| Henry Tonks A Girl with a Parrot ca. 1893 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
"The artist makes us feel like an intruder in this painting as we witness the private world of a young girl. Dressed in a nightgown and gently brushing her long hair, she sits before a full length mirror studying her reflection. A parrot watches the mechanical repetition of her brush strokes. The small size of the painting draws our attention to the intimacy of the scene. Tonks has captured a moment in the girl's childhood which adult viewers may regard with sadness or even envy."
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| William Rothenstein Woman standing in a Doorway ca. 1894 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
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| William Rothenstein The Butcher's Shop under the Trees 1899 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
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| Lucien Pissarro April, Epping 1894 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
"The earliest of Lucien Pissarro's paintings in the Tate collection, made a few years after he settled in Britain, April, Epping of 1894 reflects the artist's continuing admiration for Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, the 'neo-impressionist' or 'divisionist' artists with whom he had been friends in Paris. For a few years his father Camille had also been an enthusiastic practitioner of divisionism, the style of painting in dots of light colour favoured by Seurat and Signac, and all four artists had shown a group of paintings in Paris in 1886, in the last of the series of impressionist exhibitions. Lucien was then still living with his father, and had introduced him to these younger painters. Camille did not persist with this laborious way of applying oil paint, but during the 1890s his pictures were still speckled with luminous touches of color. Similarly, in his first paintings in Britain, Lucien did not continue to apply separate dots, as he had done in landscapes he painted in France until 1890."
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| John Lavery Mrs Guthrie 1898 oil on panel Tate Gallery |
"This tiny portrait study is of the wife of Lavery's friend the artist James Guthrie. They had married the year before. It may be a sketch for a larger portrait, or perhaps executed as a present. Lavery became a stylish portrait painter, especially of women, and like Whistler had a preference for dark colours and elongated proportions, but with a sharper sense of fashion."
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| George Thomson St Paul's ca. 1897 oil on canvas Tate Gallery |
"This is one of a series of pictures that Thomson made of St Paul's Cathedral from different vantage points and under varying light conditions. According to D.S. MacColl, Philip Steer rescued this picture from Thomson's studio floor, presumably before it was first shown at the New English Art Club spring exhibition of 1898, where it was praised by the critics. In 1889 Thomson had figured in the one and only exhibition of the London Impressionists, a group that included Sickert, who believed that the urban scenery of the capital was a valid subject for impressionist painting. Thomson suspended his interest in impressionism in the mid-1890s in favour of Spanish Old Master style painting, but later turned again to Monet."
– quoted passages based on notes by curators at the Tate in London