British Impressionism

In the late-19th century, contact with French Impressionist ideas meant that British artists' discontent with academic Victorian art became transmuted into a new concept of the role of art and the artist. In a new awareness of painting, disparate artists merged and refined their ideas on colour, light and form into an Impressionistic style that is distinctly British. Artists such as Philip Wilson Steer, George Clausen, Roderic O'Conor and Dame Laura Knight depicted an enormous variety of urban and rural scenes, from fashionable tennis parties, music-hall entertainers and laundry shops, to goose girls, boat-builders, turnip harvesters and picnickers.