Long Crendon

Long Crendon is a village in Buckinghamshire whose medieval court house and old cottages made it a characteristic English rural subject. Steer painted it in 1924, when he was in his mid-sixties and near-blind—a condition that forced him to increase the scale of his brushwork as his eyesight deteriorated. His late landscapes have a distinctive quality: broad, almost blurred handling that might be seen as decline in control or equally as a final freeing from detail in pursuit of pure atmospheric impression. Long Crendon's village street or church provided the compositional structure around which Steer organized his soft, late-period light. The National Galleries of Scotland holds this late work alongside his earlier, sharper Impressionist paintings, allowing the trajectory of his long development to be traced by comparison.

Oil on canvas with the broad, soft handling of Steer's late period, when declining eyesight contributed to increasingly atmospheric effects. Details are dissolved into tonal masses; brushwork is larger and more gestural than earlier work.