Derwent Lees

Derwent Lees (14 November 1884 – 24 March 1931) was an Australian landscape painter.

Self-portrait

Biography

Derwent Lees was born Desmond Lees in Hobart, Australia, in 1884. His father was general manager of the Union Bank of Australia. He suffered a head injury and lost a foot in a riding accident as a youth, while studying at Melbourne Grammar School in 1899–1900.^[1] Afterwards, he wore a wooden prosthetic. Following a brief stay in Paris, he moved to London in 1905 and studied at the Slade School of Fine Art with Henry Tonks and Frederick Brown. He joined its staff in 1908 while still a student, and remained there, on and off, for ten years.

He was a member of the New English Art Club from 1911. The earliest known pencil work of a model is from 1909 while at the Slade school and is held in a private collection in Doreen, Victoria, Australia. He also exhibited at the Goupil Galleries and the Chenil Gallery in Chelsea. His work was shown in the Twentieth Century Art Review Exhibition of 1914 and the Armory Show in New York, where he was the only Australian artist represented.^[2]

He was a friend of Augustus John and James Dickson Innes, and spent the period from late 1910 to 1912 with them at a cottage called Nant Ddu in north Wales. He married his wife, Edith Harriet Price (1890-1984), in 1913. Under the name "Lyndra", she was one of Augustus John's former models. In 1912 Innes and Lees went on another painting trip to Collioure in France.^[3] This was shortly after the beginning of the Fauvist movement and he is the only Australian artist known to have had any connection with them.

His artistic career was curtailed by a mental health problem, diagnosed as schizophrenia in 1912, which eventually saw him confined to asylums in Surrey from 1918 until his death in 1931 at West Park Hospital, Epsom.

In 1936 his work 'Dorset Scene' was exhibited posthumously in the Venice Biennale by Great Britain.^[4]

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
• 
  Sunset Over the Dalmatian Coast
• 
  Fitzroy Square from Sickert's Old Studio
• 
  Lyndra in the Garden

Works in collections

Title	Year	Medium	Gallery no.	Gallery	Location
Lyndra at the Pool	1913	Oil on wood panel	29025	National Gallery of Australia	Canberra, Australia
Four Heads	1910	Pencil & paper	H1979.5	Brighton and Hove Museums	Brighton, England
Landscape at Collioure	1910	Watercolour & gouache on paper	N04241	Tate Gallery	London, England
The Awakening	1910	Watercolour, pen & ink	63973	National Gallery of Australia	Canberra, Australia
Lyndria in Wales	1910-14	Oil on paper	2450	Fitzwilliam Museum	Cambridge, England
Evening	1911	Oil on canvas	9684	Government Art Collection	London, England
Girl in a Black Hat	1912	Oil on wood panel	1888-4	National Gallery of Victoria	Melbourne, Australia
Metairie des Abeilles	1912	Oil on wood	N05355	Tate Gallery[5]	London, England
Metairie des Abeilles	1912	Watercolour on paper	N05356	Tate Gallery	London, England
Spanish Landscape	1912	Oil on wood panel	29026	National Gallery of Australia	Canberra, Australia
Spanish Landscape	1912-14	Oil on board	H1990.24	Brighton and Hove Museums	Brighton, England
Lyndra, the Artist's Wife	1913	Pencil & paper & board	H1981.7	Brighton and Hove Museums	Brighton, England
Lyndra in a Landscape	1913	Oil on wood panel	1821-4	National Gallery of Victoria	Melbourne, Australia
Pear Tree in Blossom	1913	Oil on wood	N05021	Tate Gallery	London, England
Lyndra at Tanygrisiau	1913-1914(?)	Oil on wood panel	1957-0014-3	Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa	Wellington, New Zealand
The Yellow Skirt	1914	Oil on wood panel	127080	National Gallery of Australia	Canberra, Australia
Self Portrait	1917	Etching	D5046	National Portrait Gallery	London, England
Not titled [Eve holding the apple]	1920-29	Watercolour, pen & ink, pencil on cardboard	57603	National Gallery of Australia	Canberra, Australia
Not titled [Portrait study: Woman with head turned to the right]	1920-29	Brush & ink & pencil on paper	57591	National Gallery of Australia	Canberra, Australia
Not titled [Profile portrait of a woman]	1920-29	Pencil on paper	57597	National Gallery of Australia	Canberra, Australia
Not titled [Woman reading]	1920-29	Pencil, ink & pen on paper	57600	National Gallery of Australia	Canberra, Australia
Lady Howard de Walden		Pencil on paper	FA101413	Brighton and Hove Museums	Brighton, England
Welsh Landscape in Winter		Oil on wood panel	1951.1086	Glynn Vivian Art Gallery	Swansea, Wales

References

1. 29 artworks by or after Derwent Lees, Art UK: see extended Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists biography, under "artist profile". Retrieved 13 June 2016.
2. Giles Auty, "Exuberance truncated", Weekend Australian, 19–20 July 1997, p. 12
3. "Carrick Hill". Archived from the original on 22 August 2011. Retrieved 25 June 2011.
4. Kerry Gardner (2021) 'Australia at the Venice Biennale: A Century of Contemporary Art' The Migunyah Press, ISBN 978-0-522-87736-6
5. Tate Collection: Derwent Lees

Further reading

• Derwent Lees, "Drawings", The Blue Review, Vol. I No. I (May, 1913).
• Alleyne Zander, "Derwent Lees", Art in Australia, series 3, no. 48, Feb 1933.
• 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.

External links

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