Derwent Lees

Derwent Lees (14 November 1884 – 28 March 1931) was an Australian draughtsman, landscape and figure painter.

Biography

Derwent Lees was born in Hobart, Australia, in November 1884, the youngest of ten children. His father was general manager of the Union Bank of Australia. He studied at Melbourne Grammar School in 1899–1900, 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 Art Museum of University College London. He regularly exhibited in London at many galleries, including the Goupil Galleries and the Chenil Gallery in Chelsea, and with Vanessa Bell’s Friday Club where he was a founding member, was invited to become a member of the New English Art Club in 1911, and in 1913 had works shown at the renowned Armory Show (the first International Exhibition of Modern Art) in New York, Boston and Chicago.

He was a friend of Augustus John and James Dickson Innes and from late 1910 to 1913, painted with them in north Wales, 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. He returned to southern France another three times prior to WWI, developing a distinctive highly coloured style following the influence of the post-impressionists.

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's 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.

His works are held in more than 50 public institutions across eight countries in :

• the USA at the Yale Center for British Art, the Chicago Institute of Art and the Rhode Island School of Design;
• the major galleries of the Midlands and North of England, and all of London’s major galleries including the Tate, the V&A, the British Museum and the National Portrait Gallery;
• the National Galleries of Canada, Wales, New Zealand and Australia, among other major public Australian and South African galleries.

The 2025 catalogue raisonné of Lees's oeuvre details over 450 works, nearly all produced in 12 intense creative years.

Selected paintings

• 
  Lyndra by the Blue Pool, Dorset (1913), Art Gallery of South Australia
• 
  Tour Madeloc in the Pyrenees (c. 1913), Yale Center for British Art
• 
  A London Square a.k.a. Fitzroy Square (1912)
• 
  The Kitchen Garden a.k.a. Lyndra in a Garden (1913)

Selected Works in Collections

References

Further reading

Davies, Lynn, Derwent Lees : art and life. Lund Humphries, London, 2005, ISBN 978-1-84822-711-8

Derwent Lees, Drawings, The Blue Review, Vol. I no. I, May, 1913.

Eric Rowan, Some miraculous promised land: J. D. Innes, Augustus John and Derwent Lees in North Wales 1910–13, Llandudno: Mostyn Art Gallery, 1982.

Merlin James, Derwent Lees, The London Magazine, Feb/Mar 1992.

Klein, Juliette and Davies, Lynn, Derwent Lees, une lumière australienne à découvrir, L'Independant Banyuls sur Mer, Dec 2025.

Holroyd, Michael, Augustus John : The New Biography, Bloomsbury Publishing, London, 2015, ISBN 978-1-78497-139-7

Lew, Henry R, In Search of Derwent Lees, self-published, 1996, ISBN 978-0-646-28383-8.

Lew, Henry R, Imaging the World, Ch, 12 Derwent Lees, Hybrid Publishers 2018, ISBN 978-1-925272-81-9, pps 172-216.

Lew, Henry R, Australian Genesis and Exodus: the stories of Derwent Lees and Horace Brodzky - their lives, their families, and their in-common friends and acquaintances, Hybrid Publishers 2023, ISBN 978-1-922768-03-2.

Zander, Alleyne, Derwent Lees, Art in Australia, series 3, no. 48, Feb 1933.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Derwent Lees.

• More works by Lees @ ArtNet
• Derwent Lees @ Epsom and Ewell History Explorer