Derwent Lees by Henry Lew

DERWENT LEES HENRY R LEW

DATE 2024 SOURCE Courtesy of the Author

DERWENT LEES

by Henry R Lew.

Derwent Lees is certainly one of the most talented artists Australia has ever produced. Blessed with an exceptional talent for drawing, which one might suppose would prove a handicap, he was nevertheless able to produce realistic works of art by covering a canvas with undisguised brush stroke lines without the need to draw his subject matter first.

Lees suffered from schizophrenia, possibly even to the extent that he suffered visual hallucinations. It is recognised that people with schizophrenia can develop sharper perceptive powers than disease-free counterparts. This may account for his ability to paint realistic images totally composed of undisguised brushstroke lines. Particularly interesting in this respect is Lees’ last painting “The Driveway to Netherne Asylum (1919)”, painted when he was a floridly schizophrenic asylum inmate. It is, technically speaking, the best impressionist landscape painting I have seen, because its use of an incredible number of perfectly placed undisguised brushstroke lines, of brilliantly chosen colours and tones, allows it to mimic natural vision perfectly

Derwent Lees was and probably always will remain a man of mystery, a man, whose only calling card is a significant number of beautiful oil paintings, water colours and drawings, in numerous styles, showing a prodigious talent and an amazing versatility. He obviously had an incredible facility to rapidly absorb and then execute hints and styles of other artists, effortlessly using these artists, perhaps even against their will, as teachers. His paintings are quite numerous, considering that most were done in seven short years, whilst he was employed at the University of London’s Slade School, and they yielded him an immediate considerable reputation, by swiftly finding their way into many important private collections, and not long afterwards into public collections as well.

His name is mentioned in nearly every important reference book dealing with early 20th century British painting. He was represented in the famous American Armory Show, a unique international exhibition containing more than 1,200 works of “modern art”, which opened in New York on 17 February 1913 and then travelled to Chicago and Boston; his work was also included in London’s famous equivalent, The Twentieth Century Review Exhibition, which was staged at the Whitechapel Art Gallery from 8 May to 20 June 1914; and his work appeared, even more amazingly, in a number of mixed exhibitions of British and combined British and French Modern Masters which travelled to, and toured far-off Australia, the country of his birth. Yet despite having achieved this, he remains virtually unknown in Australia today.

My interest in Derwent Lees represents a passion I have for people whom I feel have been unfairly treated by history. Lees fits into perfectly this category. He was every bit as talented as older, much more lauded Australian artists, like Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton, experiencing more overseas success during his lifetime than they did, when all three of them were living in England at the same time, but, unlike them, Lees tends to be largely ignored by many of the expert personnel working at Australia’s public art galleries, by most Australian art dealers and auction house specialists, and by seriously wealthy, high-profile, investor collectors who the aforementioned experts are often called upon to advise.

Lees has even been described in one article as being Australia’s Vincent van Gogh, a furious worker who passionately pursued an intense career over ten short years, only to have it all tragically cut short by mental illness. Unlike van Gogh he received significant recognition during his own lifetime, but he was not a prolific letter writer that later generations could read and thus identify with. As such, written references which respect to his personality and private life are sparse and flimsy. The more one attempts to make inroads into his persona, the more frustrated one becomes. He remains to the bitter end a man of mystery, a man poorly understood.

We know for sure that Derwent Lees was born in the district of Clarence in Tasmania on 14 November 1884. When his father, William Lees, enrolled him into Melbourne Grammar School in 1899, his date of birth was listed on the school entrance roll as being December 1884.

Presumably William Lees, like many a father of a large family, did not remember the birthdays of all his children. He had registered Derwent’s birth on Christmas Eve 1884, and presumably this was the date which stuck in his mind, and was responsible for the error which appears on the Melbourne Grammar School entrance roll. Derwent was 40 days old when William registered his birth and, surprisingly, was still un-named. His entry, which reads as “male child”, is difficult to trace and must be held to account for much of the earlier incorrect information which has been published about him.

We cannot even be sure that Derwent is his real first name. The 1899 Melbourne Grammar School entry roll lists him as Desmond. This is further confused by the fact that within the family he was called Peter, but then his immediately older brother Gilbert was known within the family as Jack. It seems that the Lees family may have been very flexible in its use of names. Derwent may have even been Derwent Desmond Peter Lees. Derwent, however, is certainly the most romantic, and most artistic of these three names, particularly in view of the fact that Clarence, Lees’s birth place, lies on the Derwent River. The mouth of the Derwent River is a wide estuary flowing in a south-easterly direction to the sea. Hobart lies on the south bank of the river near its mouth; Clarence lies on the north bank. In 1884 one would reach Clarence from Hobart either by ferry or by travelling upstream to Bridgewater.

Derwent’s father, William Lees, worked for the Union Bank of Australia (UBA) for close to 40 years, starting as a banker’s clerk in rural Victoria and eventually working his way up to General Manager in 1899. William worked at different periods in country Victoria, Hobart,

Brisbane, Sydney, Perth, Melbourne, and Sydney again. This itinerancy was obviously necessary if one harboured ambitions of significant promotion within the bank. It also served to give young Derwent a broad appreciation of Australia, both the major cities and the bush, and may well have sparked the obvious passion he developed for travel, and the ease with which he did it, in later years.

Derwent attended Melbourne Grammar School in 1899 and 1900; then the family left for Sydney where Derwent finally passed his Matriculation Examination, which was held at the University of Sydney in March 1905. His Matriculation Certificate is dated 19 June 1905.

This delay in matriculating after leaving Melbourne Grammar appears to be due to Derwent suffering a horrific riding accident. He was severely concussed and his right foot required amputation. The concussion he sustained at this time was later blamed, perhaps incorrectly, for the schizophrenia, which brought a premature end to his productive career. William Lees obtained a marvellous prosthetic foot for Derwent, complete with wooden toes, which Derwent mastered admirably. No one, who first met him in London, so much as suspected his disability.

Derwent, prior to matriculating, had already expressed a desire to learn to draw and paint properly, whereas William Lees thought he should undertake more serious university studies.

His two sisters, Olive and Phyllis, sided with Derwent and suggested that a suitable compromise might be to enrol Derwent into the Slade School in London to study “Art”. The Slade School was affiliated with the University of London, so Derwent could study what he wished there; yet at the same time reap all the other benefits of a university education. All Derwent had to do was matriculate and then this could become a reality.

William Lees eventually agreed to Derwent attending the Slade School. He even went so far as to arrange a trip to London, travelling via Italy and France so that Derwent could study the works of the Old Masters and also practise his French en route. There is strong evidence to suggest that his brother Gilbert Lees was also part of this trip and that Gilbert also remained in London for some time once the trip was over.

The Slade School into which Derwent enrolled in 1905 had Frederick Brown as Professor and the surgeon turned artist Henry Tonks as his assistant. The teaching was in the French academic tradition with a strong emphasis on life drawing of the nude.

Derwent blossomed there (1905-8). He collected prize after prize along the way, and when only half-way through the course, was appointed part-time Drawing Master at 50 pounds per annum. His last eighteen months at the Slade School was therefore spent as a student four to five days per week and teaching drawing to the other students at other times. This amazing story appears in a letter, dated 20 December 1907, which the Welsh artist James Dickson (JD) Innes (1887-1914), who was Derwent’s best friend at the Slade School, wrote to Derwent’s immediately older brother, Gilbert, who, by then, was already back in Australia; it is an illuminating letter which throws much light on Lees’s and Innes’s early friendship. It is also worth mentioning here that when Lees graduated with First Prize in Life Drawing in 1908, his previous appointment to the academic staff was made permanent, and that he held on to it until 1918, when he was admitted to the mental asylum at Netherne in Surrey.

Gilbert and Derwent were born twenty months apart and were close friends. Innes’s letter is strong evidence that Gilbert accompanied Derwent to London, that Gilbert remained there at least until 1906, and that Innes had met Gilbert and knew him well. Lees studied at the Slade School for three years and was the outstanding student of his era. The Slade Collection still houses nineteen of his drawings, fifteen of which won prizes by 1907, and his work was illustrated in Fothergill’s History of the Slade 1893-1907, published in 1907.

Innes wrote to Gilbert that “since I met you here, I have also become a scholar at the Slade.”

The friendship of J.D. Innes and Derwent Lees therefore predates the entry of Innes into the Slade School in 1906, where Derwent was already a student.

Innes’s letter also emphasised that in December 1907, Lees and Innes were very close friends, almost certainly best friends: However, by the time Derwent married Edith Harriet Price (1890-1984), also known as Lyndra, on 21 July 1913, his friendship with Innes had waned somewhat even though they were still in contact. Ian Strang, who had studied with Lees at the Slade (in 1905-6), and whose 1913 portrait of Innes is in the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff, was Derwent’s choice as best man. “I too was astonished by the Lees marriage” Innes admitted to their mutual friend, the well-known artist Augustus John, on 4 August 1913. “I think I felt rather jealous of him. Well, they looked very happy, and so good luck to them.”

Derwent officially remained on the full-time teaching staff at the Slade School until 1918, when his mental illness had deteriorated to such an extent that it became necessary to admit him to an asylum. It is believed that he was initially admitted to The Surrey County Asylum at Netherne, from 1918 until presumably sometime between 1921 and 1924, after which he was moved to the West Park Mental Hospital, in Epsom, also in Surrey, wherein he died on 28 March 1931. I say presumably because The West Park Mental Hospital was officially opened in 1924 but did take some patients from 1921 onwards. Lees’s death certificate tragically cited “exhaustion from mania” as the cause of his death.

Despite Lees’s temperament, “always nervous and excitable with a curious intensity of utterance”, he nevertheless proved himself to be an excellent teacher, who was held in high esteem by students and colleagues alike. William Lipke, in his book David Bomberg, noted that Bomberg spoke with high regard as to the revolutionary instruction he received at the Slade. In particular Bomberg praised Henry Tonks, Derwent Lees, Wilson Steer and Ambrose McEvoy. The high esteem in which Lees was held by his colleagues, accounts for the fact that he officially remained a staff member right up until 1918 when he was interned into Netherne.

Prior to 1920, the Slade School kept scanty records. From 1914 onwards, it is only the minutes of staff meetings which mention Lees’s illness and absence and expresses the hope that his health may soon improve sufficiently for a return to work. Nevertheless, any improvement seems to have been both minimal and transient, if at all. Indeed, very few works by him are dated after 1915; the oil painting of “The Driveway to Netherne Asylum”, dated 1919, is without doubt the outstanding exception. It was a tribute to the esteem with which his Slade colleagues held him that when Brown retired as Professor in 1918 and Tonks replaced him, Lees, although very sick and on leave of absence, was appointed second in charge to Tonks.

There seems little doubt that had Lees remained in good health he would have eventually been appointed Professor of Art at the Slade School.

Derwent Lees’s position at the Slade School profoundly influenced how he practised his profession. Limited as to his personal time by his full-time employment, he would utilise his generous university holidays for extensive travel, and it was whilst on these trips that he did most of his drawings and paintings. These works tended to be small but their number and

quality

remarkable

serve

as

a

tribute

to

the

incredible facility he had not only for drawing, but also for painting in watercolours and oils. His innate ability to instinctively develop a style which utilised undisguised brushstroke lines was a tremendous help to him in this respect. Most of his small oil paintings are on panels and were whipped up quickly “en-plein air and en-route.

Larger works tend to be much rarer. The few that exist include a large neo-classical portrait of “Lyndra in a Landscape” ; two larger landscapes, “Bay in the South of France” and “The Round Tree, Aldbourne”, which are based on much smaller, similar en-plein air works ; the beautiful ‘Street Scene, Bourton on the Water’ ; and only a few others. These are all, almost certainly, studio works.

The large neo-classical portrait of “Lyndra in a landscape” warrants a special mention. It is one of a small number of neo-classical paintings that Lees painted, the most notable other one being “Amazement the First Aeroplane”.

The neo-classical movement or “neo-classicism” was one of a series of movements associated with early 20th century modernism. These movements started perhaps with fauvism, moved through cubism and futurism to eventually embrace early examples of abstract art, before proceeding on to neo-classicism and surrealism.

A magnificent exhibition outlining 20th century neo-classicism was shown at the Solomon Guggenheim Museum in New York from 1 October 2010 to 9 January 2011 before moving to

the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao from 21 February 2011 to 15 May 2011. The exhibition’s title “Chaos and Classicism – Art in France, Italy and Germany, 1918-1936” suggests that the movement owed its origins to the final year and aftermath of World War I, and while it is important to stress that this is a modern movement, one is also required to state that many of its ideas are linked to much earlier Italian Renaissance ones. It is therefore surprising to discover that two Australian modernist painters, Derwent Lees and Horace Brodzky, who most of the Australian art world don’t really seem to want to know about, were painting in this same modernist neo-classicist style during World War I; from about 1914 onwards. These two artists were therefore early pioneers; one might even say they were world leaders with respect to the modern early 20th century neo-classical movement.

There were however some earlier 19th century European artists who may have influenced them to some extent: perhaps the British Pre-Raphaelites who had returned to the time of an emerging Raphael (1483-1520) for inspiration; and the latter 19th century French painter and muralist, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824-98), who also seems to have drawn inspiration from Italian Renaissance works. Where they differ from Lees and Brodzky is that they were 19th Century Classicists re-embracing Renaissance Classicism and not 20th Century Modernists, possessed with a vastly different outlook, who nevertheless were performing in a similar way.

Indeed, Brodzky was adamant that he was blown away by the frescoes of Piero della Francesca (circa 1415-92) when he toured Italy and Sicily with the young American poet John Gould Fletcher (1886-1950) in 1911. His writings are quite clear on that point. Piero was one of the most important and enduring influences on his own art.

It is most interesting to compare Lees’s neo-classical portrait of his wife, Lyndra, with Picasso’s neo-classical portrait of his wife, Olga, , which was without doubt one of the highlights of the Chaos and Classicism Exhibition. Both are large works – “Lyndra” is 110.5 x 86 cm and “Olga” slightly larger at 130 x 97 cm; both are wearing almost identically coloured orange outfits, with almost identically accentuated cloth folds; and the hands in both paintings are amazingly similar. The main difference between them is that Lyndra has a classical landscape for a background, a tribute to Britain’s most famous classical 18th century portraitists, Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-92) and Thomas Gainsborough

(1727-88), whereas Olga’s background appears to be a greyish brown studio wall. Because Picasso was always quick to embrace emerging modernist movements, one might, at first glimpse, think that Lees saw Olga’s portrait and decided to paint Lyndra in a similar manner.

Instead, the truth, as regards this matter, is that Lyndra was painted circa 1914 and Olga was not painted until 1923.

Lees is well known to have travelled widely, both in Britain and throughout the continent.

Wales and Dorset, appear to be among his favourite British jaunts. More often than not his travelling companions were one or more of three close friends; the older artists Augustus John and Ambrose McEvoy, and/or James Dickson (JD) Innes, a sickly, younger Welsh painter, who succumbed to tuberculosis at the tender age of 27 years in 1914. The European countries Lees is believed to have visited include Belgium, Croatia, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Poland, Russia, Spain and Switzerland, and all in the space of eight short years. Some of these trips are well documented in the writings of companions, friends and acquaintances. Other evidence exists in the titles and subject matters of his paintings. There is one reference which also cites a visit to Algeria; another stating that he once accompanied a Slade School student back home to his parent’s Crimean estate, visiting parts of Poland and Russia in transit; and, furthermore, there is an abundance of evidence to suggest that Derwent and Lyndra honeymooned in France - the Pyrenees, Collioure, Provence, , Étang de Berre, 25 kilometres north-west of Marseilles, and Cassis, 33 kilometres south-east of Marseilles - prior to catching trains to Switzerland, Italy and Cavtat in Croatia. In those days one could already catch trains from Marseilles to Switzerland and then on to Venice via Chiasso and Milan, from where, in turn, one could then train travel further on down to Cavtat on Croatia’s Dalmatian Coast.

With respect to the young couple’s

Croatian

sojourn,

Lees painted a watercolour titled “The Coast at Cavtat”, which was mentioned in a Redfern Gallery catalogue dated April 1940, as well as the oil paintings titled “Portrait of Lyndra on the Dalmatian Coast near Cavtat”, , “Sandhills”, , and “Sunset over the Dalmatian Coast”, , the last one having also been

painted at Cavtat (and illustrated in a Sotheby’s auction catalogue dated 11 May 1988 and a Christie’s auction catalogue dated 9 June 2006).

Lees’s amazing facility to absorb different styles and techniques, which should have been viewed as a reflection of his great abilities, has surprisingly been responsible for most of the contemporary criticism he now receives as an artist. These criticisms, which are quite unfair, owe their origins to jealous comments made by Innes circa 1912 to 1913, which Sir John Rothenstein endorsed as fact more than 30 years later in his book Augustus John, (Phaidon, 1944). Rothenstein wrote: In the course of a few enchanted years, spent now in Wales, now in the South of France, John and Innes, who were joined by the Australian Derwent Lees, an elegant artist but one who derived his inspiration from his more gifted companions, painted a group of small pictures of singular beauty. And when Innes died, and Lees ceased to paint, and the focus of John’s interest changed, something profoundly original and lovely went out of British painting, and left it colder and more prosaic.

The importance of this group of romantic painters has yet to receive adequate recognition; I hope one day there will be a special gallery for them at the Tate.

Because Rothenstein wrote that Lees was less gifted than John and Innes from the position of Director of the Tate Gallery, and because the British have always been sticklers for authority, Rothenstein’s ideas gained traction among contemporaries in the British art scene, and are still being perpetuated by British art critics and historians today. For example, Michael Holroyd, in his seminal biography of Augustus John, called Lees a “copycat of genius”. Holroyd wrote, “Lees could paint McEvoys, Inneses or Johns at will, and with a fluency that sometimes makes them almost indistinguishable from their originals – though his figures with their great dense areas of cheek and chin do have originality.” I might add that the dense areas of cheek or chin were not indicative of Lees’s style. It was simply that

nearly every portrait Lees painted was of Lyndra and she had prominent cheekbones and a prominent chin.

Prior to Rothenstein’s book being published, Lees had become very highly regarded and sought after in London. His paintings had appeared for sale in private galleries together with works

by Bonnard, Gauguin, Picasso, Camille Pissarro, Renoir, Roualt, Sisley, Soutine, Toulouse-Lautrec, Utrillo and Vuillard.

Rothenstein, by using his position of Director of the Tate Gallery to suggest that Lees was definitely less gifted than John and Innes, caused a diminution in Lees’s profile among art critics, dealers and collectors, and indicated to someone like myself that Rothenstein had little innate understanding of the importance of the use of the undisguised brushstroke line in art, and,

furthermore,

absolutely

no

innate

or

intuitive

understanding as to how a human brain responds to lines projected on to its retina. Unlike Manet and John Singer Sargent, Rothenstein had obviously never studied Frans Hals in any great detail. When it comes to the use of the line, Lees was definitely much more talented than Innes and certainly every bit as talented as John. Lees’s best landscapes are definitely more brilliant than John’s, but of course, when it comes to Lees and John, it is difficult to decide who was indeed the more talented because Lees was mainly a landscape painter and John was mainly a portrait painter. Of course, John has always been much better known than Lees because he became the most prominent British society portrait painter of his day.

Interestingly if one looks at Lees’ painting of Dorelia and Augustus John it is amazing that Lees could produce a recognisable image of Dorelia’s face with so few undisguised brushstroke lines. That is true talent.

That Lees eclectically used the combined experiences of John, McEvoy and Innes in advancing his own style was merely a reflection of his admiration for aspects of their art. John, after a trip to Wales, showed a series of paintings to Knewstub at the Chenil Galleries. Knewstub praised them, “John’s best work yet”, and stated that they would make an excellent exhibition. John was less convinced. When asked why, he replied that Lees was on the trip, decided to paint in

a style “au Augustus John” and as it turned out “Lees’s Augustus Johns were very much better than mine.” McEvoy helped to enhance Lees’s versatility with water-colours. From a more direct approach, Lees turned to the uses of sponges and other devices and likewise put his water-colours under the tap, working on them again after each washing. Innes once wrote of Lees’s pictures, “I tire of seeing my own subjects so many times.” All these comments warrant further discussion.

One needs to remember that virtually all of Lees’s work was done before the age of 30 whilst teaching in an institution. We are speaking of an age group where many people are still innovative and willing to learn. In Lees’s case these attitudes were repeatedly enhanced by the fact that he was continuously in communication with students. Traditionally, artists develop their own style by studying and copying the works of other artists, including old masters, often for years. Many a world-famous artist continued to do this into his or her thirties before confidently developing a unique style. It is of particular interest to note that if household names like Cézanne, Gauguin, van Gogh or Matisse had stopped painting at the age Lees did, all of them would have been unheard of today. Lees may well have mimicked John, McEvoy and Innes at times, but only in an attempt to improve his own art, and this certainly did not prevent him from creating pictures which demonstrate extraordinary individuality.

John and McEvoy were six years older than Lees, and by the time Lees started painting with them their skills and reputations were formidable. They were for Lees artists from whom he could still continue to learn. This he did, but never at the expense of his own individuality. His painting “Lyndra on the Dalmatian Coast”,

is a classic

example. Lees’s signature has been removed; only the last letter, the “s”, remains because someone tried to pass it off as being a major work by Augustus John. The painting however is uniquely Lees; the attempt at fraud failed, and the picture is now recognised as a Lees. Innes was a different kettle of fish.

His comments regarding Lees were reflective of an ironic intolerance born out of envy. He was younger, tubercular and well aware of his imminent mortality, all of which presumably contributed to this. However, to give Innes his due, he was an original and brilliant colourist, and it was Lees’s admiration for Innes’s use of colour, which helped Lees evolve his own art

even further. It was thanks to Innes that Lees went on to produce his brightest and most brilliant paintings. As John aptly put it, “Lees owed much to the example of Innes: he found in his friend’s approach to nature a means of release from his academic shackles, and with immense will and intelligence strove to adapt himself to a new outlook.” Innes’s comment of Lees’s pictures, “I tire of seeing my own subjects so many times” is one of sheer frustration at seeing these subjects painted better than he could have ever hoped to have painted them himself.

It is essential for one to fully appreciate that these two men, Lees and Innes, were very close, at times inseparable colleagues, who often travelled and painted together, and as such it was inevitable that they should have painted similar subjects. There is even a painting in existence on which the two collaborated. It is also necessary to realise that Lees never borrowed established ideas which Innes had been using for years. Any ideas which Lees might have owed to Innes were borrowed close to their conception. But it must be emphasised that as a draughtsman Innes was not in Lees’s class. One only has to look at their paintings to see this.

It obviously irked Innes to see similar subjects portrayed more elegantly and skilfully, with better draughtsmanship, due to Lees’s much more developed innate appreciation as to how to use the line in fine art. This difference is particularly evident when one compares the introduction of human figures into both of these artists’ paintings.

Eric Rowan, the author of the catalogue for the exhibition “Some Miraculous Promised Land, J D Innes, Augustus John and Derwent Lees in North Wales 1910-1913”, which was shown in the Mostyn Art Gallery in Llandudno in August 1982 and then toured Cardiff and Sheffield, expressed this point unequivocally when he wrote “Lees taught figure drawing at the Slade and so was demonstrably superior in the one branch of pictorial art where Innes was deficient.”

However, Rowan was wrong in stating that the reason Lees produced better figures than Innes was because he taught figure drawing at the Slade School. The reason Lees was chosen to teach figure drawing at the Slade School was because he possessed an amazing innate understanding as to how to use the line in order to stimulate the human retina; one can almost be certain that his superiors, who appointed him to the academic position of Drawing Master at the Slade merely took this naturally acquired talent and instinctive skill of his for granted and that they were totally ignorant of any scientific implications related to it, which would not be discovered for another half century. One certainly doesn’t need this innate talent to paint empty modernist landscapes such as Innes did, because if the viewer is not looking at the original landscape and the painting at the very same time, he or she can have no idea as to whether it is an accurate

depiction or not. But if an artist can’t draw or paint a human figure convincingly, this becomes immediately obvious to all observers.

When writing of Wales, Eric Rowan pointed out: … both John and Innes were born in Wales and had a special affinity for the place. For John true Bohemianism was not the artist’s cafes of London and Paris but rather breathing life in amongst the Welsh Gypsies. Innes, on the other hand, had discovered in the Welsh landscape, particularly around Mount Arenig, his goal, his whole raison d’être for being an artist.

Rowan, like other commentators before him, saw Lees as a “bit of an Australian hanger about” in relation to the two Welsh artists. He failed to realise that Derwent’s father came from Herefordshire, the English county bordering on Wales. Historically, at times, Herefordshire had even belonged to Wales. For Lees, too, the West Country was a haven in which to search for his roots, and to explore his soul.

As mentioned earlier, Lees exhibited in London with the New English Art Club (NEAC) (191119), the Friday Club (1911-16) and also at the Goupil and Chenil Galleries. The NEAC was founded in 1886 by former academicians such as John Singer Sargent, Phillip Wilson Steer, John Lavery and George Clausen as a reaction against the restrictive and parochial attitudes of the Royal Academy. One should be reminded here that Sargent and Lavery were brilliant exponents of the undisguised brushstroke line. The NEAC quickly became popular with people from the Slade School. This was because it was initially considered to represent the modern wing of British Art, albeit gradually less so by the time of Roger Fry’s Manet and the PostImpressionists exhibition at the Grafton Galleries from 8 November 1910 to 15 January 1911, whereupon its more reactionary faction returned to the Royal Academy, and its more progressive faction went on to form the Camden Town Group, with the NEAC remaining positioned somewhere in-between these two. The Friday Club had been organised by Vanessa Bell and included Mark Gertler, James Dickson (JD) Innes, Derwent Lees and Henry Lamb among others. In 1913 Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry and Duncan Grant established a splinter society, the Grafton Group, and no longer exhibited with the Friday Club. By 1914 such artists as David Bomberg, Frederick Etchells, CRW Nevinson, Edward Wadsworth, Bernard Meninsky and the Nash brothers, John and Paul, had replaced them. With the exception of

Etchells and John Nash all these new arrivals had been Lees’s students at the Slade School as had Mark Gertler, Jacob Kramer, William Roberts, Isaac Rosenberg and Stanley Spencer.

These students as a group had a vitality and a vision not seen before or since at the Slade and were to go on to completely transform the evolution of modern British painting. As Lees was by far their most progressive teacher, much more so than Brown or Tonks, one wonders as to the role he might have had in nurturing this amazing revolution. Unfortunately, there were no written records kept at the Slade at this time, so one can neither confirm nor deny this. One can merely speculate.

At this same time, Lees’s drawings were reproduced in the London cultural magazines Rhythm (an Art, Music and Literature monthly) and The Blue Review (a Literature, Drama, Art and Music monthly), which were both edited at different times by John Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield. Murry and Mansfield reproduced “A Design”, a drawing by Derwent Lees, on page 475 of their last edition of Rhythm in March 1913; and “Two drawings” by Derwent Lees between pages 42 and 43 of their first edition of The Blue Review in May 1913.

Every artist requires a patron and perhaps Lees’s biggest break in this respect was to have had his work shown to the American collector John Quinn. An extremely wealthy bachelor and American lawyer, Quinn was obsessed with purchasing modern art and the collection which he put together was one of the most spectacular of all time. The artists he collected included Bomberg, Brancusi, Braque, Cassatt, Cézanne, Daumier, Degas, De La Fresnaye, Delauney, Derain, Dunoyer De Segonzac, both Duchamps, Dufy, Epstein, Gaudier-Brzeska, Gauguin, Gertler, Gore, Gris, John, Kuhn, Laurencin, Lewis, Manet, Matisse, Pascin, Picasso, Pissarro, Prendergast, Puvis de Chavannes, Redon, Rouault, Rousseau, Sargent, Seurat, Severini, Signac, Toulouse-Lautrec, van Gogh, Vlaminck, Weber and Yeats and many others. Both Ezra Pound and Augustus John advised him at times as to what he should buy. Included in his collection were numerous works by both Augustus John and his sister Gwen John, nine works

by Innes and eight by Lees.

It was because of being in the Quinn collection that a selection of Welsh paintings by John, Innes and Lees reached their widest audience. This occurred in the celebrated Armory Show, which opened in New York in February 1913 and then travelled to Chicago and Boston. This monumental exhibition became a milestone, if indeed not the foundation stone, when it came to the development of an interest in modern or progressive art in the USA. It was originally

intended as a comprehensive exhibition of contemporary American art but with the appointment of the artist Arthur B. Davies as President and organiser it took on much grander proportions. His vision transformed the proposed exhibition from a grand display of American parochialism into an International Exhibition of Modern Art. He obtained exhibits of current innovative European art in an historical context which was intended to outdo Roger Fry’s London post-impressionist exhibitions. John Quinn was well-known to Davies, there being eighteen works by Davies in the Quinn collection. Quinn’s collection was, of course, the most appropriate local one from which to borrow works for the show. Quinn’s loan, 77 items in all, was by far the largest to the Armory Show, if not the most varied and daring. In total there were more than 1,200 works exhibited and these were viewed by over 250,000 visitors. Included among the artists were such notable names as – Archipenko, Bernard, Bonnard, Brancusi, Braque, Bourdelle, Cassatt, Cézanne, Conder, Corot, Courbet, Cross, Daumier, Degas, Delacroix, De La Fresnaye, Denis, Derain, Duchamp, Duchamp-Villon, Dufy, Dunoyer de Segonzac, Epstein, Friesz, Gauguin, Gleizes, Goya, Ingres, Hassam, Herbin, Hodler, Kandinsky, Kirchner, Laurencin, Léger, Lehmbruck, Maillol, Manet, Matisse, Monet, Munch, Nadelman, Pascin, Picabia, Picasso, Pissarro, Prendergast, Pryde, Puvis de Chavannes, Redon, Renoir, Rouault, Rousseau, Russell, Seurat, Sickert, Signac, Sisley, Slevogt, Sloan, Steer, Souza-Cardoso, Toulouse-Lautrec, Vallotton, van Gogh, Vlaminck, Vuillard, Whistler, Yeats, as well as John, Innes and Lees.

Lees exhibited three oil paintings in the Armory Show: “Evening, 1911”, “A Sullen Day, 1911” and “Lowering Clouds, 1912”. Only three artists with any connections to Australia exhibited in the Armory Show: Charles Conder, an Englishman, who lived and painted in Australia from 1884 to 1890; and two artists who were both born in Tasmania in 1884, Derwent Lees (18841931) and Francis McComas (1884-1938).

Lees was quite a philanderer. His artificial foot was no handicap in this respect. This should not come as a surprise when we consider his close circle of friends. Augustus John was a womaniser extraordinaire. Augustus John and Henry Lamb both had affairs with each other’s wives after which Euphemia Lamb swapped over to James Dickson (JD) Innes. Indeed, Derwent’s friends were quite taken by surprise when in 1913 he suddenly married Edith Gilbert Price, better known as Lyndra, who had modelled for Augustus John. “I was astonished by Lees’s marriage,” Innes wrote to John. “I felt rather jealous of him. Well, they look happy; so good luck to them!”

Lyndra proved a blessing for Lees. She had a marvellously calming and steadying effect on him. After the wedding, they honeymooned in France, Switzerland, Italy and Croatia. When they returned to London, Derwent started to prepare for his first one-man show at the Chenil Gallery on King’s Road, Chelsea, scheduled for January 1914. Every painting sold, mostly into well-known private collections. For example, Lord Sandwich and Lord Howard de Walden, both acquired multiple examples of Lees’s work. Lees continued to paint Lyndra in various landscapes until 1915 when his health started to irrevocably deteriorate. These paintings of Lyndra are somewhat reminiscent of John’s paintings of Dorelia, but the clothing is tighter, and Lees displays accentuated folds in Lyndra’s long, flowing dresses in accordance with what was to become the so-called neo-classical style.

Two well-recorded episodes of Lees’s erratic behaviour have been left to posterity, one, impetuous and the other, certainly psychotic. In the first episode Lees turned up at the Chenil Gallery to confront Knewstub in relation to a mutual financial dispute. Knewstub denied him entry and retired to the room above the shop. Lees, not to be outdone, and despite having one wooden foot, managed to climb up to the first-floor balcony. He then used his prosthetic foot to break the balcony window, whereupon, to Knewstub’s horror, he gained access to the upstairs room and beat him up. In Lees’s defence, John argued that it was impossible to think badly of such a man. Knewstub must have had a talent for riling artists. On another occasion, Orpen, who was none other than Knewstub’s brother-in-law, is said to have pointed a gun in Knewstub’s general direction and fired it, presumably intentionally missing him, and putting a bullet hole through one of his own paintings instead. The second episode, the psychotic one, took place at Chirk Castle, the home of Lord and Lady Howard de Walden. Lees arrived there for a formal house party only to think John had brought him to a high-class mental asylum.

Lady Howard de Walden described his behaviour as follows:

I used to hear a knock on my bedroom door at any hour of the night, and wake up, imagining hearing breathing. And there he stood, quite quietly and said, “I come to your door for protection, now I will go to bed.” Every day I took him for a walk, but he would only come if I wore white gloves. He did not feel safe without the gloves. So white gloves I wore over hills and dales. He did paint rather well, but was as mad as a hatter.

This behaviour was of course a manifestation of the schizophrenia which in the end incapacitated him.

Many images of Lyndra survive but few of Lees. Two early photographs from his time in Australia survive: one taken at the family’s

Melbourne

home,

“Armadale”, whilst he was still a Melbourne Grammar student and one shortly before he left for England. There is a selfportrait etching which appears in the catalogue of his 1934 exhibition at the Redfern Gallery, and one of the original prints from this plate is now in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery in London . There is also a beautiful pencil self-portrait, , which serves as a companion piece to an equally, if not even more beautiful, Lees pencil portrait of Lyndra, . Note the use of lines in these three works! The National Gallery of Victoria has a self-portrait in red chalk with Derwent sporting a moustache and beard. An oil painting, “The Billiard Hall” shows Lees playing billiards (see Front cover). There is also an oil painting by Innes called “Moonlight and Lamplight (1908)” which shows Lees sitting by a window reading a book. McEvoy did an etching “Mr. and Mrs. Derwent Lees 1915”, which is in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Lees also appears in the well-known group photograph of the Slade School picnic of 1912, which has been reproduced in a number of books, such as Richard Cork’s David Bomberg and Lisa Tickner’s Modern Life and Modern Subjects. Lees is in the back row at the

extreme right. Others in this photo are Professor Fred Brown, and a number of Lees’s students, including Isaac Rosenberg, David Bomberg, Dorothy Brett, Dora Carrington, Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson, Mark Gertler, William Roberts, Adrian Allinson, and Stanley Spencer - to mention some but not all of them.

The Redfern Gallery, with Lyndra’s help, staged a retrospective exhibition of Lees’ work in April 1930. Fine Art 1931, the special spring number of The Studio, reported it as follows: Pictures in oils and water-colours painted before 1919. “Lyndra by the Blue Pool” lent by the Earl of Sandwich; “The Blue Pool” and “The Dancers” (composite picture by Lees and Innes) lent by Sir Cyril Kendall Butler; a second picture also titled “The Blue Pool” lent by G.P. Dudley Wallis. An oil painting titled “Lyndra” by Lees was acquired by the Leeds City Art Gallery; a version of “The Blue Pool” was acquired by the Manchester City Art Gallery; and a water-colour, “The Bathers” was acquired by the Leeds City Art Gallery from the Redfern Gallery in the course of the year.

The Redfern Gallery staged another retrospective exhibition of Lees’s work, a posthumous memorial one in April 1934.

Fifty-two

pictures

were

displayed in both oils (38) and water-colours

(14).

“Cornfield, Aldbourne, Wilts” was lent by Lord Ivor Spencer Churchill; “Approaching Storm, Mediterranean” was lent by Lord Alington; “The Shore, Dorset” was lent by Sir Michael Sadler; “The Blue Pool, Dorset” was lent by Edward Marsh; “Olive Trees near Collioure” , was lent by A Knyvett; “Cassis” was lent by Sir Cyril Kendal Butler; “Landscape, North Wales” was lent by The Earl of Sandwich; “On the Mediterranean Coast” was lent by Ernest Marsh; and “Massere, Pyrenees” was lent by Lord Howard de Walden.

The following review appeared in Apollo:

This exhibition makes it clear that Derwent Lees was hitherto known, if at all, only as a kind of “also ran” with Mr. John and the late J.D. Innes. The curious kinship with Innes still remains, and the influence of Augustus John, by some five or six years his senior, is likewise traceable. But now his individual elements are more clearly seen. Such a painting as “Sunset near Collioure”, for example, is in its handling unmistakably his own. There is an exciting overstatement of colour in it, as there is also, for example, in “Approaching Storm, Mediterranean” , or in “Cornfield, Aldbourne, Wilts”, which makes one think of van Gogh rather than of his own companions, though there is none of van Gogh’s unruliness. In some of the landscapes such as “Bathers”, there is a hint of Monticelli, and in others such as “The Pear Tree, Provence”, there is something of Samuel Palmer. In the watercolour paintings, especially in the “Study of a Young Girl”, an affinity with McEvoy is obvious. It is sincerely to be hoped that the Tate Gallery may eventually acquire one or more examples of this tragic genius’s work. “The Little Gardens, Cassis”, “The Pear Tree, Provence”, , “Amazement – The First Aeroplane”, amongst the oils, and “Lake in Wales” and “Study of a Young Girl” amongst the water-colours, I venture to recommend for the purpose as especially suitable, so far as those still available are concerned.

The Tate Gallery had in fact already acquired the water-colour “Landscape at Collioure” by Lees through the National Art-Collections Fund in 1927. It then borrowed “The Pear Tree, Provence”, which it re-named “Pear Tree in Blossom” from the Redfern Gallery from 1934 to1938, before buying it through the Knapping Fund in 1939. This painting had been shown at the famous Twentieth Century Art Exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, (May to June

1914), a London equivalent of The Armory Show), being a comprehensive survey of avantgarde developments both from Britain and abroad. By 1964, the Tate Gallery Catalogue listed four works by Lees, two more having been acquired in 1942.

Since then, Lees has continued to be featured in exhibitions of British Art. When the British Council organised for a post-World War II Continental Exhibition of Modern British Pictures from the Tate Gallery (1946-7), to tour Brussels, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Paris, Berne, Vienna, Prague, Warsaw and Rome, Lees was included. This exhibition ended with a final curtain call showing at The Art’s Council of Great Britain at 4 St James Square, London, in 1947.

In 1948, the Contemporary Art Society in London included Lees in their survey of British and French masters titled “From Sickert to 1948: The Achievement of the Contemporary Art Society”.

Lees was also selected for exhibition in “The Slade 1871-1971: A Centenary Exhibition”, which took place at the Royal Academy of Arts from 20 November to 12 December 1971.

Some Miraculous Promised Land: J D Innes, Augustus John and Derwent Lees in North Wales 1910-1913 was staged at the Mostyn Art Gallery in Llandudno in August 1982 and then moved on to Cardiff and Sheffield In 1983, Lees was included in the Arts Council of Britain’s exhibition “Landscape in Britain 1850-1950”, which opened at the Hayward Gallery in London from 10 February to 17 April; moving on to Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery from 30 April to 4 June and then to Stokeon-Trent City Museum and Art Gallery from 11 June to 16 July, before finally being shown at the Mappin Art Gallery in Sheffield from 23 July to 28 August.

In 1989, a Lees oil painting from the Manchester City Art Galleries titled “A Woodland Idyll”, was included in the Barbican Gallery’s exhibition “The Last Romantics: The Romantic Tradition in British Art – Burne-Jones to Stanley Spencer”.

Two more works by Lees were exhibited in a major exhibition “British Vision: Observation and Imagination in British Art 1750-1950”, which was held at the Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Ghent, from 6 October 2007 to 13 January 2008.

Even more interesting is the fact that Lees’s work has toured or appeared in Australia on numerous occasions in mixed exhibitions of modern British and European masters. These have included both overseas and locally curated exhibitions.

When Alleyne Zander first brought his paintings to Australia in 1933, she was forced to write: The long neglect, in Australia, of Derwent Lees, an Australian-born artist, whose distinction has long been recognised in England is most difficult to account for. The work of Derwent Lees holds a unique place amongst the art of Australians in London. His pictures rarely come on the market and are increasingly difficult to obtain. He is represented in all the leading art galleries in England: the Tate Gallery in London, and the Manchester, Leeds and Bradford Art Galleries. Yet, so far as has been ascertained, he is represented in no single art gallery of the land of his birth; and so far, the Felton Bequest has passed him by.

The exhibition which Zander had organised was called “An Exhibition of British Contemporary Art” and it toured both Melbourne and Sydney under the auspices of the Victorian Artists Society and the Society of Artists, New South Wales, respectively in 1933. It included not only Lees, but also Charles Conder, Jacob Epstein, Mark Gertler, Spencer Gore, Duncan Grant, Augustus John, Henry Lamb, brothers John and Paul Nash, CRW Nevinson, Ben Nicholson, William Orpen, Samuel Peploe, Lucian Pissarro, William Roberts, Walter Sickert, Mathew Smith and Christopher Wood among others.

Brisbane may have felt neglected as regards the Zander exhibition. In 1935 the Board of Trustees of the Queensland National Art Gallery organised through the Empire Art Loan Collection Society a Loan Collection of British Contemporary Art at the Randall Art Gallery, in City Hall, Brisbane. Zander had shown seven works by Lees; Brisbane showed five. The run of other names was not dissimilar. Some important artists missed by Zander but shown in the Brisbane exhibition were Vanessa Bell, David Bomberg, Frank Brangwyn, William Russell

Flint, Harold Gilman, Charles Ginner, James Dickson Innes, Laura Knight, Ambrose McEvoy, Bernard Meninsky, John Singer Sargent, Phillip Wilson Steer and James McNeill Whistler.

And then in 1939, Keith Murdoch, through his Herald and Weekly Times, provided the sponsorship for a most extraordinary exhibition of French and British Contemporary Art to visit Australia; once again, Lees was included. This exhibition was organised by the art critic Basil Burdett, and showed 215 works. It opened in Melbourne on 16 October 1939, barely six weeks after World War II was declared, and provided young Australian artists such as Arthur Boyd, Albert Tucker, Yosl Bergner and Sidney Nolan, who were all completely overwhelmed by it, with their first truly live appreciation of major École de Paris paintings. At the same time, it created an unprecedented furore among art academics in both Melbourne and Sydney, where a conflict between academics and modernists had already climaxed. This exhibition, like the Armory Show in New York, would eventually change the direction of art throughout the entire Australian continent by establishing a new way of thinking for new generations of modernist Australian artists. A few of the pictures in the show were sold, but most remained in storage in Australia for the duration of the war. Lees was represented by his landscape in oils titled ‘Banyuls’, which is now in the collection of the Southampton City Art Gallery in the UK. The other artists in the show formed a veritable who’s who of late nineteenth century and early twentieth century modernist international trends. Included in the exhibition were Pierre Bonnard, Georges Braque, Paul Cézanne, Marc Chagall, Salvatore Dali, Giorgio de Chirico, Roger De La Fresnaye, André Derain, Raoul Dufy, André Dunoyer de Segonzac, Jacob Epstein, Max Ernst, Othon Friesz, Paul Gauguin, Harold Gilman, Spencer Gore, Duncan Grant, Juan Gris, James Dickson (JD) Innes, Augustus John, Henry Lamb, Marie Laurencin, Ferdinand Léger, Wyndham Lewis, Henri Luce, Henri Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani, Albert Marquet, John and Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson, Roland Oudot, Jules Pascin, Samuel Peploe, Pablo Picasso, Odilon Redon, Georges Rouault, Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, Matthew Smith, Chaim Soutine, Stanley Spencer, Phillip Wilson Steer, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Maurice Utrillo, Suzanne Valadon, Félix Vallotton, Kees van Dongen, Vincent van Gogh, Maurice Vlaminck, Edouard Vuillard and Ossip Zadkine.

Lees’s work was to visit Australia, yet again, as part of an overseas travelling exhibition, this time it would appear in the Massey Collection of English Painting from the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, which toured both Australia and New Zealand in 1949 to 1950. The range

of artists represented was not greatly dissimilar to the aforementioned 1933 and 1935 exhibitions.

Yet despite all these visits from abroad, there have only ever been two solo Australian exhibitions of Lees’s work. The first was an exhibition of 46 water-colours and drawings from the Rex de Charembac Nan Kivell collection, which took place at the Deutscher Galleries in Armadale, Melbourne, from 30 November to 13 December 1978; the second was a more comprehensive, four-state touring exhibition in 1997, which I helped organise, after having written and published the only monograph written exclusively on Lees titled In Search of Derwent Lees in 1996. This exhibition was called “Derwent Lees: The Forgotten Australian” and was curated by David Thomas, a former Director of the Art Gallery of South Australia, the Newcastle City Art Gallery and the Bendigo Art Gallery. It showed 25 oils, and sixteen watercolours and drawings at Carrick Hill, Springfield, Adelaide (from 20 March to 27 April); at the McClelland Gallery, Langwarrin, Melbourne (from 11 May to 22 June); at the Sir Hermann Black Gallery, University of Sydney (from 8 to 26 July); and finally at the Customs House Gallery, University of Queensland, Brisbane (from 22 August to 12 October).

Another interesting point worth noting is that this exhibition showed a handful of interesting Australian landscapes by Derwent Lees.

These paintings are unique and are particularly deserving of a special mention in any Australian publication dedicated to Lees’s work. They are quite different from similar scenes by other Australian artists. Their unique beauty lies in the fact that they exude softness and gentleness. To imply that they were painted in Australia prior to Lees’s departure is erroneous. If that were indeed the case, there would have been no need for Lees to attend the Slade School, because he would have arrived there already a master. The purely

Australian content of these paintings may mask for some viewers the strong affinity which they share with Augustus John landscapes. As in John’s work, parts of the underlying panel are left unpainted to form outlines, a technique which John would apply as his homage to Whistler.

These scenes tend to be located around Sydney, and may represent places which Lees loved to visit after he left Melbourne. But it is also possible that they were simply scenes he acquired from photographs or postcards. It is believed that the desire to paint these pictures arose when Derwent saw some Australian landscapes displayed by other artists in London circa 1908 to1909. Whether these paintings were seen at formal exhibitions, or at private viewings, is uncertain, but two names which have been mentioned in connection with such possibilities are Arthur Streeton and a very young Hilda Rix Nicholas. If Lees had seen such paintings at this particular time, a period when he was certainly under the influence of Augustus John, it should not come as a surprise that he decided to go ahead and paint some Australian landscapes of his own in a style similar to, and bearing homage to, John.

Much of the mystery of Lees’s life relates to his schizophrenia. At the time he contracted the disease little was known about it (indeed, the term schizophrenia was not even coined until 1911), and for the duration of his own lifetime adequate help was unavailable. Severe progressive deterioration was considered inevitable and the disease was regarded by relatives as casting a definite stigma on the entire family. Victims tended to be buried alive in a family closet, which was usually an asylum, after which little more was said or heard of them ever again. Asylum conditions in those days tended to be appalling. In Derwent Lees’s case, it was a blessing that the results of a brilliant talent for drawing and painting were not buried alive with him.

At the same time as the Forgotten Australian exhibition, Lees also had five oil paintings and one water-colour drawing shown in an exhibition titled “Bohemian London: Camden Town and Bloomsbury”, which was staged by the Art Gallery of South Australia from 16 May to 29 June 1997.

Since then, his work has also been seen in “The Edwardians: Secrets and Desires” at the National Gallery of Australia from 12 March to 14 June 2004 and then at the Art Gallery of South Australia from 9 July to 12 September 2004; in “For Matthew and Others: Journeys with Schizophrenia” in Campbelltown, Penrith, Sydney and Melbourne from September 2006 to July 2007; in “Modern Britain 1900-1960: Masterworks from Australian and New Zealand

Collections” at the National Gallery of Victoria from 15 November 2007 to 24 February 2008; and in “The Naked Face: Self-Portraits” at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2010 to 2011.

Lees’s name appears in numerous books discussing modern British art, and his work has also been reproduced in a number of these.

His oil paintings have also been used to illustrate the covers of paperback editions of famous novels. Three that come to mind are Penguin editions of The Escape by Katherine Mansfield (published in 1995) and The Rainbow by D H Lawrence (published in 1995) and a Longman Cultural Edition of Howard’s End’ by E M Forster (published in 2010).

But despite all of this, Lees sadly remains neglected in Australia and nowhere more so than in Melbourne, the Australian city one would expect him to be most identified with. For example, in the early 1980s I wrote to the National Gallery of Victoria requesting photographs of two works in their collection painted by the Australian artist Derwent Lees. I received a reply that Derwent Lees was not represented in their collection. I rang up to complain stating that I had viewed these works in the dungeons and that they were to be found adjacent to works by Augustus John. They were then promptly located, and I was accordingly notified that, unlike myself, the Gallery considered him a British artist and not an Australian one. When I raised an objection to this point of view it was suggested that I write to the Director, Professor Patrick McCaughey, which I did, requesting that Lees be re-classified as an Australian artist and that he be hung in the Australian section as an expatriate Australian artist. I found McCaughey’s reply extraordinary. His gist was that if I thought an artist’s classification could be changed, or his picture hanging redirected, just because the Director requested it, then I was extremely naïve as to the political machinations and orchestrations which take place in an institution such as the National Gallery of Victoria.

It was not long thereafter that Picasso’s “Weeping Woman” was stolen from the Gallery, and then rapidly returned, thankfully. Once it was re-hung, I took my wife to see it. Next to it, between it and Camille Pissarro, hung “Portrait of Lyndra in a Landscape” by Derwent Lees.

A label underneath it read “Australian/English”. The painting remained there for three months in the company of some of the world’s greatest modern masters, much as Lees’s work had done previously on no less than three continents, but it certainly didn’t gain him entry into the Australian section and as yet never has. Brisbane, Sydney and Adelaide have been kinder to

him. These galleries have fine modern British collections frequently on display, and he nearly always gets his dues along with an Australian/English attribution. The National Gallery of Australia now has eight works by Derwent Lees, the Art Gallery of NSW has one, the National Gallery of Victoria has two, the Art Gallery of South Australia has one, the Queensland Art Gallery has two and the University of Melbourne Collection has two. There are two works in New Zealand galleries: one in Auckland and one in Wanganui.

Three stunning examples of Lees’s work are magnificently displayed at the South Australian Government’s stately Adelaide mansion of Carrick Hill. One of these, most unfortunately, has in recent years, been mistakenly taken away from Lees and reattributed to his close friend James Dickson (JD) Innes. This work, “Chateau Royal, Collioure” , is one of several stunning very brightly coloured landscapes which Lees painted whilst honeymooning with Lyndra in France, Switzerland, Italy and Croatia in 1913.

DERWENT LEES - REPRESENTATION IN PUBLIC COLLECTIONS. Australia Adelaide, Art Gallery of South Australia Adelaide, Carrick Hill Collection Ballarat, Art Gallery of Ballarat Brisbane, Queensland Art Gallery Canberra, National Gallery of Australia Melbourne, Ian Potter Museum of Art, the University of Melbourne Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria Sydney, Art Gallery of New South Wales Canada Ottawa, National Gallery of Canada New Zealand Wellington, Museum of New Zealand (Te Papa Tongarewa) Whanganui, Sarjeant Gallery

United Kingdom Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museums Birmingham Museums Trust Bradford Museums and Galleries Brighton and Hove Museums and Art Galleries Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum Cardiff, National Museum Wales Hull, Ferens Art Gallery Leeds Art Gallery, Leeds Museums and Galleries Liverpool, Liverpool Museum and Walker Art Gallery London, Government Art Collection London, National Portrait Gallery London, British Museum London, Tate Gallery

London, University College London Art Museum London, Victoria and Albert Museum Manchester Art Gallery Manchester, British Council Collection Newcastle upon Tyne, Laing Art Gallery Oldham, Gallery Oldham Oxford, Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology Sheffield, Museums Sheffield South Ayrshire, Rozelle House Galleries Stoke-on-Trent, The Potteries Museum and Art Gallery Southampton City Art Gallery Southport, Atkinson Art Gallery Collection Swansea, Glynn Vivian Art Gallery Wakefield, Hepworth Gallery USA Newhaven, Connecticut, Yale Centre for British Art Providence, Rhode Island, RISD Museum

EXPLORE MORE ESSAYS AT BENURI.ORG