Derwent Lees

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.{{Art UK bio|oxbio=1|retrieved=13 June 2016|ref=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.Giles Auty, "Exuberance truncated", Weekend Australian, 19–20 July 1997, p. 12

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.{{Cite web |url=http://www.carrickhill.sa.gov.au/british_lees.html |title=Carrick Hill |access-date=25 June 2011 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110822182812/http://carrickhill.sa.gov.au/british_lees.html |archive-date=22 August 2011 |url-status=dead }} 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.Kerry Gardner (2021) 'Australia at the Venice Biennale: A Century of Contemporary Art' The Migunyah Press, ISBN 978-0-522-87736-6

File:Derwent Lees - Lyndra by the Blue Pool, Dorset - Google Art Project.jpg|Lyndra by the Blue Pool, Dorset (1913), Art Gallery of South Australia

File:Derwent Lees - Tour Madeloc in the Pyrenees - Google Art Project.jpg|Tour Madeloc in the Pyrenees ({{circa|1913}}), Yale Center for British Art

File:Lees-Sunset.jpg|Sunset Over the Dalmatian Coast

File:Lees-Fitzroy.jpg|Fitzroy Square from Sickert's Old Studio

File:Lees-Garden.jpg|Lyndra in the Garden

{{reflist}}

• 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.

{{commons category|Derwent Lees}}

• [http://www.artnet.com/artists/derwent-lees/ More works by Lees] @ ArtNet
• [http://www.epsomandewellhistoryexplorer.org.uk/DerwentLees.html Derwent Lees] @ Epsom and Ewell History Explorer

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Category:1884 births

Category:1931 deaths

Category:20th-century Australian painters

Category:20th-century Australian male artists

Category:Australian male painters

Category:People with schizophrenia