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Derwent Lees
Australian painter From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Derwent Lees (14 November 1884 – 24 March 1931) was an Australian landscape painter.
Biography
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Derwent Lees was born in Hobart, Australia, in November 1884. His father was general manager of the Union Bank of Australia[1]. He studied at Melbourne Grammar School in 1899–1900, [2] and later lost a foot in a riding accident, subsequently wearing a wooden prosthetic foot. He moved to London in 1905 and, following a brief stay in Paris, commenced his studies at the Slade School of Fine Art under the supervision of Henry Tonks and Frederick Brown. While still a student, he was invited to join the Slade staff in late 1907, a position he held for ten years.
His earliest known works are pencil drawings created in c.1907 while at the Slade School. These remain held by the UCL Art Museum. He regularly exhibited at the Goupil Galleries and the Chenil Gallery in Chelsea and with the Friday Club. He was one of the founding members of Vanessa Bell’ Friday Club[3], and was invited to become a member of the New English Art Club in 1911, and in 1913 his works were shown at the renowned Armory Show in New York.[4]
He was a friend of Augustus John and James Dickson Innes, and from late 1910 to 1913, painted with them in north Wales[5], then again with Augustus John in 1914. In 1910, accompanied by Innes and another Slade colleague, Lees went on a painting trip to Collioure in France.[6] This was five years after the fervour of the Fauvist movement. He returned to southern France another three times prior to WWI.
Lees married his model-muse, Edith Harriet Price (1890-1984), in the summer of 1913. Under the artist-model pseudonym "Lyndra", she was one of Lees and Augustus John's principal pre-WWI models.
His artistic career was curtailed by poverty and subsequent mental health problems, which saw him confined to asylums, initially in 1918, then permanently from 1919 until his death in 1931 at West Park Hospital, Epsom.
In 1936 his work 'Dorset Scene' was exhibited posthumously at the Venice Biennale, probably by his widow, as Great Britain did not contribute any works that year due to political tensions.[7]
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