STARR, Sidney - b. 1857 Kingston-upon-Hull, d. 1925 New York

English genre, portrait, landscape and decorative painter. He studied at the Slade School under Edward John Poynter (1836-1919) and Legros, winning a Slade Scholarship 1874. Starr spent the first half of his artistic career in Britain and Europe, before moving to New York. He became a member of the Society of British Artists (SBA) in 1886, in the year of Whistler’s presidency. Whistler’s plans to reform the Society, which received a Royal charter in 1887, were poorly received and he was forced to resign in 1888. He took a large group of followers with him, including Starr, Frances Bate, Frederick Brown, Francis James, Paul Maitland, Theodore Roussel, Philip Wilson Steer, George Thomson, Bernhard Sickert and Walter Sickert. This group, headed by Walter Sickert, took control of the New English Art Club from 1888. They exhibited as the ‘London Impressionists’ at the Goupil Galleries in December 1889 and in Sickert’s Chelsea studio, receiving support from two new periodicals, the Whirlwind and Art Weekly.

Starr’s early work was much influenced by Whistler. He exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1882-86; he was prize-winner at the Paris International Exhibition in 1889. He went to the U.S.A. in 1892 but retained British nationality; he became member of the New York Watercolour Club. He executed decorative paintings in Grace Chapel, New York, 1896, and in the Congressional Library, Washington, D.C., and designed a stained-glass window for Lafayette College. He died in New York in 1925.

The City Atlas

Whistler’s followers included Theodore Roussel, Paul Maitland, Walter Richard Sickert and the young Wilson Steer - that is, the artists widely considered the leading British Impressionists. With Sidney Starr they split off from the New English Art Club. This sub-group used the label London Impressionists. The driving force was Sickert who outlined the task facing British Impressionism: to record the magic and poesy that lay all around in everyday life. London, the great metropolis, provided all the stimulating subject-matter that was necessary.

The concentration on London subject-matter was apparent in the work of Sickert, Starr, Roussel and the latter’s pupil Maitland. Urban problems resulting from 19th-century expansion in the cities - such as unemployment, poverty, child labour, alcoholism and prostitution - were almost totally absent from this art. The city was being viewed as a predominantly middle-class thing.