Girl seated on a pier, Walberswick; Mrs Dolly Brown

Bruce Laughton (op. cit., pp. 10-11) comments on the present work, 'Girl on a Pier, Walberswick, which was shown at the NEAC in the spring of 1887, [and] is the earliest of the 'On the Pierhead' series. In this version the horizon is near the top of the picture, so that the water glinting in the sunlight occupies most of the picture surface on either side of the seated girl. She is painted against the light, strongly contrasting in tone with the sea behind her, and there is a light rim round the edge of her pink dress - a contre jour effect which was to fascinate Steer throughout his career. Two studies of the seated girl, in soft lead pencil, occur in the earliest Walberswick sketchbook. In these she is seen almost solely as a pattern of shadows, differentiated in tone by hatched shading. The small canvas sparkles with light, and the direct, loose but confident brushwork is even closer to Manet. It must have been begun in the summer of 1886. Steer was now preoccupied with light, but still using a technique more traditional than the small strokes of broken colour by then common to many followers of Impressionism in France'.