Three Girls Bathing, Thame

Three Girls Bathing, Thame of 1911 returns Steer to the bathing subjects that characterized his most celebrated early work at Walberswick and Boulogne. He had painted girls paddling in Suffolk coastal surf in the late 1880s with a freedom that shocked conservative Royal Academy audiences and delighted Francophile modernists. By 1911 he was painting inland river bathing at Thame in Oxfordshire—a more domestic setting than his coastal work, but similarly interested in the relationship between young figures, water, and light. The Thames Valley subjects of his middle period have a different quality from the open North Sea coast: an enclosed river scene, quiet English summer, tentative figures in a protected bend of the river. The National Galleries of Scotland holds this as part of their British Impressionism holdings.

Oil on canvas with confident, painterly brushwork. Water and figures are treated with equal freedom—no labored description, only the immediate impression of sunlight on the river and the forms of the bathers.