Steer was the son of a drawing teacher, and studied at an art school in Gloucester before attending the Academie Jullian and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He was much influenced by both Whistler and Monet, and exhibited his work mostly at the New English Art Club which he and his friend Sickert founded in 1886. His sunny landscapes, worked with a palette knife, established his reputation, although he also painted portraits and still-lifes. He is one of the most important of the English Impressionists, and in many ways his attitude is very like that of the French Neo-Impressionists, but towards the end of  his life  he reverted to painting more in the style of Constable, with broad brush-strokes and contrasts of clouds and sunshine. However his last watercolours are more in the manner of Turner, with increasingly diffused colouring and poetic imagination.

Based on Phaidon encyclopedia of Impressionism, Maurice Serullaz, Phaidon, 1978