The Steer family moved to Apsley House, Whitchurch, Monmouth, when Wilson Steer was three and he lived there for seventeen years attending the Hereford Cathedral School and, when he was about eighteen, studying drawing and painting under John Kemp at the school of art at Gloucester. He failed to enter the Academy Schools and went to Paris in 1882, studying first at Julian’s under Bougureau and later, in 1883, at the Beaux Arts under Cabanel.

In 1892 the Anglo-Irish novelist George Moore wrote 'it is admitted that Mr Steer takes a foremost place in what is known as the modern movement' and around this time Steer was producing the beach scenes and seascapes that are regarded not only as his finest works but also as the best Impressionist pictures painted by an Englishman, which, on the whole, seemed to have missed, almost completely, the Impressionist movment outside the few within the New English Art Club.