Stephen Harris (1913-80) was a British post-impressionist painter. Reared in the shadow of Bloomsbury and Camden Town and a pupil of Duncan Grant, he thought Sickert a honest painter, and recognized Stanley Spencer’s genius. Harris was totally out of sympathy with art which was urban, socially conscious or cerebral. He shared the Impressionist’s desire to capture Nature’s colours and tones as the light revealed them, but his palette was his own and he painted Barbon and the Cumbrian landscape as Pissarro had painted Pontoise, or his beloved Constable the Stour, with total identification with his subject. The results show him to have been a fine draughtsman and colourist, who left behind paintings which will endure against all his expectations.
Stephen Harris