Harold & Walter Steggles, Artists

Harold Steggles (1911-71) and his elder brother Walter were precocious artists who found early success as adolescents. Harold was the second of five children and grew up in Ilford with a father who managed a specialist shoe shop in the Strand and a mother who worked as dressmaker but had always wanted to be a painter.

When Harold left school and found employment as a clerk with a solicitor in Grays Inn at fourteen years old, he and Walter took to visiting galleries and viewing the national painting collections together. Soon they were undertaking sketching trips to pursue their shared passion, and reading widely about art, discussing the writings of John Ruskin and Joshua Reynolds.

In 1925, they visited an exhibition of paintings by the Bethnal Green Men’s Institute Art Club at the Bethnal Green Museum and signed up for lessons at the Institute, aged fourteen and seventeen respectively. However, the brothers were quickly disappointed with the tuition and they transferred to John Cooper’s art classes at the Bromley & Bow Institute where he encouraged them to paint scenes in the vicinity of the Institute in Bow. Under his tutelage, both brothers flourished as artists and they were to become the youngest members of the East London Group.

When Harold was just seventeen years old, John Cooper hung eight of his paintings at the East London Art Club exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1928, and Charles Aitken, Director of the Tate Gallery bought one, offering twice the asking price of one guinea.

Photographs of the brothers at this time show them as a pair of smiling handsome youths with short, neat haircuts and near-identical matching suits, sometimes worn with plus fours. Enjoying the fruits of their artistic success, they took motoring trips together and expanded the range of their subject matter to include the rural landscapes of East Anglia.

“All my brother’s pictures found buyers,” wrote Walter in excitement at his younger brother’s triumph when they showed with the East London Group at Lefevre Galleries and, over successive years, Harold contributed more than sixty pictures to these exhibitions. Before long they found themselves sought after by other galleries and Harold became a protoge of the flamboyant aesthete Eddie Marsh who lived near his office in Gray’s Inn as well as accepting a prestigious commission from Villiers David to paint the gentlemen’s clubs of St James.

The climax of this run of success for the brothers came with Harold & Walter Steggles’ joint exhibition at Lefevre Galleries in 1938, yet Harold continued his work as clerk apart from some time in hospital being treated for stomach ulcers which he attributed to malnourishment in childhood.

When the war came, both were excluded from service for health reasons and applied to become war artists but were turned down. Instead, Harold was asked by Muirhead Bone to contribute paintings to an exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford which were to be sold to benefit the Red Cross.

In 1943, when he was thirty-two, Harold married Lilian Wood, the widow of a Spitfire pilot, even though her father did not approve of Harold being an artist. It was a curious union of contrasting personalities, Harold considerate and quiet, and Lilian, outgoing, keen on tennis and uninterested in art. Harold took legal exams and advanced in his work at the solicitors but considered himself lacking in the necessary education and temperament, confiding to his daughter Elizabeth that, if it had not been for the war, he might have carried on with commissions. Twenty-five years after Harold died at the age of sixty, Walter wrote, “I have not yet recovered from the shock of losing him.”