Philip Wilson Steer, Girl in a Blue Dress c.1891
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Steer often painted children, showing them either in domestic interiors or playing outdoors on the beach at Walberswick in Suffolk.
This girl admiring the pages of a picture book is Rose Pettigrew, who modelled for Steer for eight years. She wrote: ‘I love posing for Philip; and first of all posed for little money as I thought he was very poor, and child as I was, wanted to help him’. Her vulnerable position as a young girl, however, is borne out by hard wooden chair she sits on and her sparse surroundings.
July 2004
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Philip Wilson Steer
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Category
Painting
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Decade
1890-9
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Style or ‘-ism’
19th century
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New English Art Club
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Subject
people
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actions: postures and motions
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sitting
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portraits: female
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Pettigrew, Rose
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