Back in the frame
Kenneth Steel was a Sheffield artist and commercial illustrator who experienced triumph and tragedy in his life. Now he is the focus of a new exhibition in his home city. Daniel Dylan Wray reports.
Edward Yardley, biographer of the relatively little known Sheffield artist Kenneth Steel, says: “It was a bit like being a detective trying to find out information about him.” Born in Sheffield in 1906, Steel became interested in design at an early age and his skills were clearly evident as he gained a scholarship at the Sheffield Technical School of Art at the age of 12. On leaving education he followed in the footsteps of his father, George Thomas Steel, and became an engraver. However, inspired by the rolling hills and stunning backdrop of the nearby Peak District, in his spare time he began to paint, even getting tuition from the renowned Sheffield artist Stanley Royle, with whom he became lifelong friends.
His artistic prowess marked him out as something of a rising star. He secured a publisher for his engraved work, and in 1932 the Sheffield Telegraph described Steel as the year’s “biggest artistic find”.
Four years later Steel was the youngest artist to be elected to Royal Society of British Artists and he soon had solo exhibitions in London and Dublin.
However, in 1940 tragedy was to strike and the trajectory of his life was to be altered drastically. In December of that year both Steel’s mother and his pregnant wife died tragically in the Sheffield Blitz, with Steel’s house taking a direct hit from bombing. This also destroyed much of his studio work. As it wiped out much of his life’s work up until that point, it made it extra difficult for Yardley to piece together his life. “This kind of studio work is often the essence of what you look at,” he says. “To see what was left: sketches, letters, all that sort of thing. That all went up in smoke in 1940.”
To make matters even more difficult, much of Steel’s later period work also disappeared. “At the end of his life, his distraught widow started a bonfire of the studio work that he had done post-war,”
Yardley says. “She started burning works in the studio and apparently an autobiography as well. So there were no letters, no diaries, nothing like that, which is usually the starting point for any sort of work of academic study you would do on an artist.” However, following on from a 2020 biography, Yardley is co-curating an exhibition of works assembled from private collections and other galleries, at Weston Park Museum in
Sheffield. Places in Time: the Art of Kenneth Steel which brings together the most comprehensive collection of his art ever to go on display, including over 100 drawings, paintings, prints, posters and more.
Steel’s artistic life changed as much as his personal one following his wartime trauma. “Steel really early on made his success in printmaking as much as watercolours and oils,” reflects Yardley. “But you can almost carve his career in half with the Second World War as the dividing line. So he came to fame in 1932 and by 1939 he was doing really well in both the print market and the watercolour market and he was on the crest of a wave and then, as happened with a lot of people in lots of walks of life, the Second World War put an abrupt halt to all that.”
During the war Steel was an air raid warden and his artistic endeavours slowed during these years. “By the time he finished all his work he didn’t really have time to do much painting,” says Yardley. “Because working during the day means daylight hours have gone so there was no chance to do much painting.” His circumstances were also incredibly difficult after losing his home. “He had only just married at the outbreak of war and in 1940 Olive Steel was pregnant with her first child. After he lost her, his mother, his home and his studio work, it must have been devastating. He and his father went to squat in a cottage. They had to just find a derelict cottage to live in.”
Post-war, Steel went on to specialise as a commercial artist, including work for Sheffield Council as it redesigned the city. “One of the first projects he did was something called
Sheffield Replanned,” says Yardley. “Which was about rebuilding Sheffield after the war.” He also produced many familiar travel posters and carriage prints for British Railways, as well as architectural perspective drawings. He drew the first visualisation images of the soon to be built Jodrell Bank Observatory for Husband & Co, as well as producing drawings of South Kirkby Colliery and Abbeydale Industrial Hamlet.
Yardley believes Steel’s move into the role of a jobbing designer from a fine art painter is one of the reasons he didn’t garner the acclaim that some of his peers enjoyed. “All that love of railway posters has only come back in the last