Earlier Works Rejected

Noted Artist Is Dead At Eighty-Two.

LONDON. - The death took place March 21 at his home at Chelsea of Mr. P. Wilson Steer, O.M., the artist, after a short illness.
"He was the last of a great line of artists," said a Royal Academecian. The son of a teacher of painting, he was born at Birkenhead in 1860, studied at Ecole des Beaux Arts, Paris, and was a pupil of Cabanel.
Over fifty years ago he exhibited at the Royal Academy, but in the early nineties his and Mr. Walter Sickert's works were rejected. Mr. Sickert advertised in a newspaper that he and Mr. Steer had "had the honor" to be rejected by the academy.
Mr. Steer broke with Burlington House, helped to found the New English Art club, and sent no more pictures to the Summer Academy until 1940 - the reconciliation having begun with the friendly treatment of his works and those of other "rebels," at the United Artists' Show the previous winter.
He was the first artist to receive the Order of Merit. In 1929 the Tate Gallery honored him with a "one-man show" - its first by a living artist. His self portrait hangs in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.
"Flo," as his housekeeper is known to a wide circle of artists, told a reporter that she had been with him for twenty-five years. "I was brought up from the time I was a girl by Mrs. Raynes, whose portrait is in the Tate Gallery," she said, "and when she died I continued to act as his housekeeper."
A friend summed up his appearance and accomplishments in the phrase, "He looks like a policeman and paints like a Constable."
In his old age he retained a blunt wit. After inspecting in silence an exhibition by artists of the ultra-modern schools, he remarked, "I imagine that most of them have private incomes."

Source: The Winnipeg Evening Tribune, May 2, 1942, Page 12