Derwent Lees

Derwent Lees (1884 - 1931)

Derwent Lees was born in Australia in 1884, and travelled to Europe in 1905. He studied first at Melbourne University and then in Paris before attending the Slade. There he met Dick Innes whose approach to nature he assimilated and practised with similar vitality and freshness. He remained at the Slade after completing his studies and served as Assistant Drawing Master between 1908 and 1918. Randolph Schwabe later recalled that ‘[h]is teaching was highly thought of by his colleagues and by those who came under him.’ Schwabe also remarked that his technical facility enabled him, ‘chameleon-like,’ to adapt the styles of Innes, Augustus John and Ambrose McEvoy, all of whom he admired, (the biographer Michael Holroyd described him less sympathetically as a ‘copycat of genius’).

Three landscapes by Lees were included in the International Exhibition of Modern Art at the Armory, New York, in 1913. The same year he married Edith Ashley, known as Lyndra, an artist’s model who had sat for Augustus John. His career was curtailed by a severe mental illness, which saw him confined to asylums in Epsom, Surrey—later described as ‘Europe’s largest psychiatric hospital complex’—from 1919 until his death in 1931.