Walter Steggles, 1908 - 1997

Walter - ‘Wally’ - Steggles was, like his younger brother, Harold, a remarkable, gifted and very dedicated member of what became the East London Group. Born into a working-class family, Walter joined a shipping firm in the City of London when he was 14 and he continued to earn a living in this industry until he retired in 1967. Even before he left school, however, he and his younger brother regularly went sketching. They were not the only aspiring artists from a working class area: in 1924, an art show was held by a group of amateur artists from the Bethnal Green Working Men’s Institute, set up in 1920 as a school for adult education. This was ‘started little more than a year ago by a warehouseman, house decorator, three deck hands waiting for a ship and a haddock smoker. It has attracted to itself about 30 regular members.’ Within a year, Walter Steggles joined the Bethnal Green Men’s Art Club.

It is fascinating that, so shortly after the First War - which must have shaped the environment into which the Steggles boys were growing up - there were artists, such as radical British Impressionist, Charles Genge, who were convinced that art should enrich the lives of all and who offered these evening classes at the Bethnal Green Institute. Having said that - and, much as I admire Genge - it is true that this was aimed at men only until, in 1925, Genge was replaced by the inspirational John Cooper who, in 1927, took the evening classes further east, to Bromley-by-Bow. Cooper had already studied in art schools in Yorkshire, before serving in the Royal Flying Corps and, thereafter, attending the Slade – then the centre of the most ambitious, lively and effective teaching in art, focused on drawing from everyday life, open to new ideas and available to women as well as men. Motivated by these principles, Cooper ran these evening classes for almost three years, bringing in other mentors, some very established artists and some whom Cooper had met at the Slade: amongst the former was Walter Sickert whose reputation, by this date, was enormous and who was still, after many decades, exploring new ways to paint the modern world; amongst the latter was the young Phyllis Bray (briefly Cooper’s wife), who went on to become a landscape painter, a leading muralist (with Hans Feibusch), advertising artist and illustrator. The group was rapidly established as the East London Art Club, which held its first major exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1928. Members included the Steggles brothers and others who would also go on to make a name for themselves as artists, including Phyllis Bray, Brynhild Parker, Elwin Hawthorne and his uncle, Henry Silk. The group showed no fewer than 178 paintings (11 of which were by Walter Steggles) and six sculptures in 1928. Many of these were preoccupied by the post-War, familiar, urban, English world which surrounded them and they attracted huge attention. John Cooper, flying ace and portrait painter, had influential connections: Sir Joseph Duveen, highly successful art dealer and benefactor of the Tate Gallery (then the National Gallery of British Art), and Charles Aitken, first Director of the Tate and keen to promote modern, accessible, British art, bought dozens of the works, including three by Walter Steggles.

Success in 1928 led to further significant exhibitions, including at a major West End gallery, Alex Reid & Lefevre in King Street, Mayfair, where, in November 1929, the artists first appeared as The East London Group. Many of their early works impressed with their visions of a sombre, relatively empty, even slightly sinister, urban world. Steggles’ tumbling, ‘Old Houses, Bethnal Green’ - lent the warmth of human life only by the pale underwear hanging to dry, flying in the wind - is notable with its distinctive combination of intimate familiarity with, even affection for, the sombre scene and a dark and uneasy awareness of a sense of despair. An echo of that strange sensitivity to the complex inner lives being led in familiar urban environments, can be found in many of Walter Steggles’ paintings of urban life in the late 1920s-early 1930s – see, for example, ‘Railway Siding’, ‘Bow Backwater’ or ‘Brymay Wharf’ (also called ‘Red Bridge, Bow’). The austere geometry of industrial structures dominates, subsumed beneath the dusty, lemon hues of polluted skies, and enlivened only with hints of light shining from metal, silhouettes of occasional people and touches of green leaf and twisted tendrils. These are powerful paintings. It is not surprising that, in the Daily Mail on 17 December 1930, the influential historian and art critic, P. G. Konody, wrote,

"If an Utrillo of London is to come into being- a painter who would interpret London not only as we see it but as we feel it- he will come from among the members of the East London Group and his name will be either Elwin Hawthorne or W. J. Steggles!"

Walter and Harold Steggles continued to exhibit at all the East London Group shows between 1928 and 1936. In the latter year - when London saw its first International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries, and when political turmoil in Europe was beginning to loom threateningly once again (and just two years after Hitler had visited the Biennale, and met Mussolini) - Great Britain was represented in the Venice Biennale by, amongst others, Walter Sickert, Philip Wilson Steer, Augustus John, Ethel Walker and Barbara Hepworth – and by Walter Steggles and Elwin Hawthorne.

Thus far, I have concentrated on exploring a little of Walter Steggles’ urban paintings. This tends to be what we associate with the East London Group. But, more often than not, interiors, portraits, seascapes and landscapes predominated. Walter Steggles, in particular - often accompanied by Harold - increasingly turned to the English countryside and, indeed, to Normandy and the south of France, travelling to many areas and soon choosing to live in various rural parts of the country, producing evocative pictures such as, ‘Landscape near Bath, Somerset’, now in the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, Coventry, or ‘Norfolk Smallholding’, in Manchester Art Gallery. Again, we find that quality of intense engagement which distinguishes his urban scenes, with buildings and landscapes and skies almost bursting with life and excitement. During his sketching trips he would sometimes take photographs, but was mainly preoccupied with sketching on the spot, as a base for working up his oil paintings in his studio.

Walter was the last surviving member of what had been the East London Group. He had returned to college at the beginning of the War (rejected from the military because of his asthma), when he studied at the Central School of Art, from 1939 until 1943. He continued painting until the end of his life, when he died in Calne, Wiltshire, at the age of 89.

The pre-War fame of the East London Group faded. Indeed, memories of what the group had been and done seemed to slip away altogether. David Buckman’s 2012 book,From Bow to Biennale, was an essential prompt to the revival of the fascinating story and remarkable work of so many of these artists. Much of the information about Walter Steggles was provided by Alan Waltham who - unwittingly - found that he would be marrying into the artist’s family when he met Steggles’ niece in the late 1970s. In 2016, the Beecroft Gallery in Southend held an exhibition of ‘The East London Group of Artists – Out of the City’, where there were many pictures depicting many corners of the country. In 2021-22, the Beecroft repeated the success, with its ‘Brothers in Art: Walter & Harold Steggles and the East London Group’. Southampton Art Gallery and Bow Arts’ Nunnery Gallery have also held rewarding shows of the East London Group and their successors. And, David Buckman’s invaluable book, From Bow to Biennale, Artists of the East London Group has been updated more than once (and a new edition is due in February, 2025).

At last, the almost incomprehensible ‘loss’ of these artists is being rectified. But, there are some of the artists - and, probably, many of the paintings - which remain out of reach. When I find a Walter Steggles painting – in a public collection (see the website of ART UK for a handful of Walter Steggles’ works in public galleries around the country) or in an auction sale, I am thrilled. But there are many more, in private collections, which remain virtually unknown. This is an artist whose work is very well worth searching for!

Hilary Taylor © 2025