Philip Wilson Steer, O.M. (1860-1942)

Steer visited Ironbridge, near Bridgnorth, on the upper reaches of the Severn in 1910. He was given the use of a large painting room (40 feet long with five windows) which he shared with Fred Brown and William Coles, and throughout the summer he concentrated on painting a deserted quarry of red ironstone, overlooking the small town, with its viaduct and factory chimneys. Bruce Laughton considers that the present work was painted on the spot and that 'the motif is made into a solid 'closed' composition rather than a vista, and recession is played down in favour of a continuously tactile picture surface ... It is this type of Steer landscape, more than any other, that Max Beerbohm might have had in mind when he drew his famous cartoon with the caption: 'Mr. P.W. Steer, prospecting - and the landscape beginning to fidget under his scrutiny' (The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford).
(see B. Laughton, op. cit., p.102).

The present work is a first version of Steer's A Deserted Quarry, Ironbridge, which was acquired by Manchester City Art Gallery in 1919.