Derwent Lees would have had no memories of the family weekender on Hobart’s Eastern Shore where he was born in 1884, or the wide estuary from which his parents took his name. But long after his lonely death in London, it’s time our island community recognised the connection.
Lees left Hobart as a baby, living in a succession of Australian and New Zealand cities as his father, a bank manager, rose through the ranks of the Union Bank (a forerunner to the ANZ Bank). After beginning art studies in Melbourne under Walter Withers, he left Australia for London in 1905, never to return.
A prize-winning student and teacher at London’s Slade School of Art in subsequent years, Lees became a significant landscape and figure artist. He is represented in leading art museums in Britain, North America and Australia – including Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art (Mona). Yet Tasmanians know virtually nothing about him.
Until now. Derwent Lees is at last getting the attention he deserves, from Lynn Davies, a fellow Tasmanian whose career has been devoted to safeguarding records of the past as a librarian-archivist at the University of Tasmania.
In the early 1900s Lees was among many artists, including the Fauvists Henri Matisse and Andre Derain, who took inspiration from the spectacular mountain and coastal scenery and uniquely intense light of the far-southern French department of Pyrénées-Orientales.
Davies, too, has a connection with Pyrénées-Orientales. For each of the past 20 years she and her husband Peter Davies, a Tasmanian freshwater scientist with French family connections, have made their home through the French winter in that same region, in the coastal village of Collioure.
In 2019 the director of Collioure’s art museum was preparing an exhibition about non-French artists who had spent time in the village before World War I. She was aware that Collioure had been a favourite haunt of Lees and knew he was Australian, and sought help from Davies to fill out his story.
That simple request led to years of work by Davies, with voluntary help from others, that culminated in the first full biography of Lees, now published by the prestigious English art, architecture and design publisher, Lund Humphries.
This is far more than a simple biography. In accepting her story of Lees’s life, Lund Humphries asked Davies if she would also create a Derwent Lees catalogue raisonné – a comprehensive, annotated listing of all his known works to serve as the definitive reference for authentication and research.
“I thought, how hard could that be?” says Davies. “It turns out – very hard… as there were a lot of inaccurate locations, titles and misinformation about Lees, his travels, and his works that had persisted for more than a century… We and a wonderful group of volunteers in France, Wales and England geolocated Lees’s landscapes [while] I researched [their] provenance and exhibition history.”
Over little more than a decade Lees turned out over 450 accomplished works, while rubbing shoulders with some of the cream of British artistic and intellectual life, the likes of Augustus John and James Dickson Innes (both close friends), Vanessa Bell and Lytton Strachey.
Reading about his travels and travails, it’s not hard to appreciate the effort involved in producing a catalogue raisonné. While Lees had won a Slade prize for his drawing of the human form, the main focus of his art was landscape painting. In honing his skills he produced 260-odd scenes from England, Wales, France and Poland.
Peter Davies, Lynn’s scientist-husband, led the complex task of establishing the true location of those landscapes, turning up a host of errors that through multiple changes of ownership had become cemented in the provenance of his works, including ascribed locations that Lees had never visited.
Lees’s later life was clouded by poverty and separation from his wife, Edith. There was also the toll of war. Friend after friend departed for the horrors of the Western Front in France. He would have been one of those lost souls except that he had lost a foot in a horse-riding accident as a boy in Australia, making him ineligible for active duty.
The Slade School retained him as a teacher during the war, but his life fell apart. Suffering from a chronic depressive disorder, probably bipolar in a time before lithium treatment, he died in a London asylum in 1931, aged 46.
Nearly a century on, Lynne Davies has at last done justice to the story of this remarkable Tasmanian. Derwent Lees: Art and Life, her comprehensive, lavishly illustrated biography, will be on sale in Australia from next Saturday, 1 November.