Derwent Lees: ‘the most modern of the modernists.’
The names are not quite equal in fame. Most people will have heard of Augustus John, one of the great draughtsmen of the early part of the twentieth century – his contemporary, the writer Virginia Woolf, called him the 'saviour' of British painting. By contrast, Derwent Lees, one of John's great friends and collaborators, is a remote figure, though he was celebrated and lionised in his day. The influential critic and art historian Paul George Konody called him 'the most modern of the Modernists.’
‘Spanish Landscape.’ (1912)
Desmond Lees, one of ten children to bank manager William and his wife Getrude was born on 14th November 1884 at Clarence in Tasmania. As a child, he lived in Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney. He later adopted the name 'Derwent' after the affection he felt for the river of the same name which snakes its way through the southern part of his place of birth.
While living in Sydney he suffered a serious riding accident. In a letter dated March 1912 to the artist Christopher Nevinson, Lees describes how the accident happened while he was out riding with a friend: 'my mare was spooked, she reared up, I came out of the saddle and was left hanging with my right foot still in the stirrup; she dragged me along, my head hitting the floor several times.' The injuries Lees suffered were so severe his foot was amputated and replaced by a wooden prosthetic.
Lees later passed his pre-tertiary exams travelling to Paris in 1905 and then on to London to enrol at the Slade School of Fine Art.
Young, ambitious and precociously talented, Lees proved to be an outstanding student. In 1908, the year he graduated, he was awarded the school's First Prize in Drawing and Painting from Life, hired as an assistant drawing master and remained on its staff for a decade.
Lees' three closest friends from this period were fellow artists: Ambrose McEvoy, James Dickson (Dick) Innes and Augustus John, and with all three or separately, he went on painting trips in Britain and overseas . From what we know of Lees' works, he was greatly influenced by the Fauves whose show at the Salon d'Automne in Paris in October 1905 had outraged the French art establishment.
He had joined the Friday Club, founded by Vanessa Bell in 1905 – the Camden Town Group were regular attendees – and Lees will have seen painter and critic Roger Fry’s exhibition 'Manet and the Post-Impressionists' at the Grafton Gallery in 1910. Here there were paintings by living artists, including Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, but the main emphasis was on the holy trinity: Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cezanne and Paul Gauguin.
In 1911, Derwent Lees accompanied Innes and John to Arenig Fawr, a high mountain in Snowdonia, North Wales; it was soon after Lees had returned from the south of France and Spain. In some of these works, he painted Wales as if it were in the Mediterranean.
‘Evening.’ (1911)
There are stories of how Lees climbed the rugged terrain at all hours of the day and night only stopping to paint just as light revealed a scene that had to be rapidly made before the sky changed and the scene was lost; he was taking very physical and mental risks to create a new art. The trio made hundreds of paintings in this way and many were later painted over. In an undated letter to a friend, Lees described their method of painting: 'we decided to paint only when the sunlight or moonlight showed us Arenig and her landscape in all of her beauty, we would then immediately paint or draw at great speed and with great energy, this wonder. It is exhausting us all, though it is greatly worth it.'
This sense of the immediate is what gives the landscapes Lees painted here an easy joy. It is also what makes his work from this period, and that of Innes and John, so radical – Arenig, with its undiscovered, solitary beauty, hit all three artists with the force of a revelation. The 'Arenig School' was one of the most remarkable styles of painting in modern British art history until it ended in 1913.
In February 1913, Lees had three of his Arenig works displayed at the ground-breaking Armory Show in New York. His work was exhibited in the same show as Cézanne and Van Gogh, three years after he had encountered their work in Fry's post-Impressionist exhibition in London.
In the summer, Lees married the artist's model Edith Harriet Price; the couple were introduced some years before by John and she features in a number of his paintings, and those of Lees, as ‘Lyndra.’ Some writers have blamed Lees' diagnosis of schizophrenia around this time on his marriage to Edith but this is to misunderstand the circumstances of his illness.
‘Lyndra in the Pyrenees.’ (1913)
Lees continued to paint and show his work at various London galleries, including the Carfax Gallery alongside Walter Sickert. As his professional life saw an increasingly exciting future, his private life was fast unravelling. In a letter dated 5th June 1916 to the art collector Cyril Butler he wrote: 'my brothers are in this terrible war [the First World War] and I fear for them, I see them and my father in my dreams and nightmares, in my house, in my wife. I see them everywhere but in my paintings.'
Sometime during 1914, Lees painted ‘Mothers and Children in a Landscape,’ as a direct comment on the war. The sombre work, which depicts Eirene, the Greek goddess of peace, amongst a group of women and children in a Mediterranean setting, saw him take a new direction – it's a painting which could be said to prefigure the traditional values of the European 'Return to order' style of painting after the war.
Lees' output dropped dramatically and he showed very little; the one painting at that year's New English Art Club is mentioned in a view of the show by the critic Sir Claude Phillips. Writing in the Westminster Gazette, he said Lees' work was: 'slowly maturing to ultimate perfection.' Lees submitted a further painting to the NEAC in 1917.
Lees was committed to the Claybury Asylum in Essex in 1918 after living for a short time at the St Pancras Workhouse in London. There was a painting hiatus until 1921 when an exhibition was arranged by the Redfern Gallery at the Alpine Gallery in London, and in 1923 paintings were shown at the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle upon Tyne, although new work was rare.
In 1926, one of Lees' works entered the national collection at the Tate when it acquired a watercolour, ‘Landscape at Collioure,’ painted in 1910 and gifted by the collector F. F. Madan through the Art Fund.
‘Landscape at Collioure.’ (1910)
A retrospective exhibition was held at the Redfern Gallery in 1930 and works were purchased by both Leeds and Manchester Galleries – including ‘Lyndra,’ (1914) and ‘The Blue Pool.’ (1911).
‘The Blue Pool.’ (1914)
Lees died on 24th March 1931 at the West Park Mental Hospital, Surrey, at the age of 47 and his art is often overshadowed by the trauma and tragedy of his untimely death.
In the nine decades since his death, Derwent Lees' work has continued to be exhibited. In the 1930s and 1940s his paintings were included in touring exhibitions of British art, including the 1946–1947 Tate Gallery's Continental Exhibition, and his art has been shown in Australia on four occasions.
Today, Lees' works are held in 50 public galleries across six countries.
Lees' first ever catalogue raisonné by Lynn Davies will be published by Lund Humphries in September this year; I'm pleased to have three previously 'lost' works listed: ‘A Bend in the Road,’ a view of Bourton village in Oxfordshire (c.1912), seen below and ‘Dorset Heath.’
‘A View of Bourton Village.’ (c1912)
