James Dickson Innes

James Dickson Innes (1887—1914)

Dick Innes, as his friends knew him, was born in Llanelly, Wales, but spoke with an English accent. His mother was of Catalan descent. He studied at the Slade between 1905 and 1908 where he took inspiration from the painting tutor Philip Wilson Steer.

Augustus John gave this striking description of his appearance: ‘a Quaker hat, a coloured silk scarf, and a long black overcoat, set off features of a slightly cadaverous cast, with glittering black eyes, a wide sardonic mouth, a prominent nose and a large bony forehead, invaded by streaks of thin black hair.’ He and John became close friends, probably meeting in the Café Royal, a favourite haunt of artists and bohemians, and they passed ‘a considerable time together in Wales and elsewhere’. They established there a cottage overlooking the mountain Arenig Fawr, which Innes regarded, ‘with good reason,’ John wrote, ‘as his spiritual property’. They spent the spring and summer of 1911 and 1912 painting there. Innes also painted in the south of France and Spain with Derwent Lees.

Innes died young from tuberculosis yet he worked quickly, in Wales especially his ‘activity was prodigious’, and he produced a small but personally distinctive oeuvre of landscape paintings. He exhibited at the New English Art Club from 1907, had seven paintings and watercolours included in the Armory show in 1913 and was remembered in commemorative exhibitions at the Tate Gallery and the Chenil Galleries in the early twenties.