ABSTRACT
In a review of the artist's one-man show at the Goupil Gallery in 1909, 'The Joys of Sight: Mr Steer's exhibition', Laurence Binyon reflected upon the nature of vision. Artists' summer-time retreats from the city also fall into the wider culture of ruralism but, increasingly, the concern was not for the condition of the 'peasantry'. Rural workers generally appeared only as an occasional note in Steer's compositions–as they did in much contemporary French landscape painting after 1890. Impressionism in France, he argued, proceeded from a logical and scientific position, whereas in England it derived from a poetic and romantic temperament, dating at least from the turn of the nineteenth century but temporarily obscured by mid-century aberrations like Pre-Raphaelitism. At the time of painting A Classic Landscape, however, Steer was interpreted as returning to the very sources of French Impressionism, as repeatedly stressed later in the writings of Wynford Dewhurst and Frederick Wedmore.
