Were the colourful pebbles in Steer’s Knucklebones, Walberswick (1888, Colchester and Ipswich Museums Service) a sly dig at the ‘pointillist’ style unveiled two years before at the eighth Impressionist exhibition? Steer would have been interested in – though probably sceptical about – Seurat’s scientific theories of colour. He was an instinctive artist, rather than a theoretician.

George Clausen – like Steer, a graduate of the Académie Julian in Paris, who had gone on to be Professor of Painting at the Royal Academy Schools – remembered when they were fellow members of the NEAC. ‘My impression at that time’ he said, ‘was of a man with a lazy mind, but gifted with a wonderful sense of colour; he never made a mistake about that. Since those days I have come to the conclusion that it was not a lazy mind but a concentration on the problems of colour, almost to the exclusion of everything else.’

Steer once admitted that he wished he could draw like William Orpen, who studied at Dublin Metropolitan School of Art before coming to the Slade. He joined the New English in 1900 and painted ‘Lillo’ Lumb in 1906 for her father, the Huddersfield textile magnate Joseph Lumb. In the painting, Orpen paraded his influences: most obviously, Whistler’s Miss Cicely Alexander. The convex mirror is surely a nod to Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait (Orpen loved painting mirrors). Certainly also Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez. In 1865 Édouard Manet had pronounced Velázquez ‘the supreme artist’. RAM Stevenson’s The Art of Velasquez, published in 1895, hailed him as the first Impressionist, and the book was in every art student’s pocket. Orpen visited Madrid and saw Las Meninas in 1906. Infanta Margaret Theresa in Velázquez’s painting is the ancestress of both Cicely Alexander and Lillo Lumb.

Since 1898 Sickert had been living in Dieppe but in 1905 he was visited there by a young painter called Spencer Gore, whose account of what was going on in London so intrigued him that he decided to return to England. Gore was an exact contemporary of Orpen’s, born like him in 1878 and part of the same remarkable generation at the Slade. Soon after his return Sickert declared that ‘I particularly believe that I am sent from heaven to finish all your educations!! And, by ricochet, to receive a certain amount of instruction from the younger generation.’ He started an informal group (including Spencer Gore and his friend from the Slade Harold Gilman) who took rooms in Fitzroy Street where they could store work and show it during weekly Saturday ‘at homes’. There was tea and cake and pictures that cost ‘less than a supper at the Savoy’. This one shows the Terrace Gardens near Gore’s home in Richmond.

Other artists joined the Fitzroy Street Group, including Lucien, the eldest son of the ‘Father of Impressionism’, Camille Pissarro. Born in 1863, he had accompanied his parents when they sheltered in London from the Franco-Prussian War and returned during 1883-84. A Neo-Impressionist or ‘Divisionist’, he was influenced by Seurat and Signac and had exhibited beside them in the final Impressionist exhibition. He settled permanently in London in 1890 around which time he met Steer and wrote to his father: ‘He divides his tones as we do and is very intelligent; here is a real artist!’ His arrival gave the British art scene a new, direct link to the Impressionist tradition. He joined the NEAC in 1906.

Like many people, institutions grow more conservative with the passing years, and the NEAC was no exception. By 1911 it had begun to reject work by Harold Gilman and his friends, whose Post-Impressionist inspired art was too much for the old guard. He rallied support. Over a boozy dinner at Gatti’s they discussed the possibility of ‘capturing’ the New English, but decided instead to form a new, breakaway society, and thus was born the Camden Town Group. Spencer Gore was elected its first President. Most of the members – including Robert Bevan, Charles Ginner and Malcolm Drummond – are represented in the Kirklees collection, but Gilman’s Tea in the Bedsitter is one of our greatest treasures. Striding out of the restaurant, Sickert turned and waved his arm exclaiming ‘We have just made history’.