Derwent Lees (1884–1931) was born and grew up in Australia where as a young man, following a riding accident, his foot was amputated. After a brief period in Paris he studied at the Slade between 1905 and 1907, and made a close friendship with fellow student James Dickson Innes. Lees won prizes for his fine draughtsmanship, and was invited by Tonks to return to the Slade as a drawing assistant. He remained as a teacher there from 1907 to 1918, and he appears standing at the back of the famous 1912 Slade picnic photograph, along with Gertler, Nevinson, Carrington, Bomberg, Spencer and others. Edith Gilbert (Lyndra) Price was a model, and she also posed for John; she and Lees married in 1913. This full-length figure painting, one of several that Derwent Lees painted of his wife, shows the younger artist responding to John’s example.

‘His teaching was highly thought of by his colleagues,’ Randolph Schwabe would write, ‘and by those who came after him. He had remarkable facility, and, over and above his very skillful drawings from life, adopted himself, chameleon-like, to the styles of John, Innes and McEvoy.’ Of these three, for a while Lees came nearest to Innes, explained Schwabe, before suddenly turning his style in the direction of McEvoy’s watercolours. A Times review of a posthumous exhibition at the Redfern Gallery in 1934 acknowledged all three of these artistic influences, whilst also noting Lees’s own particular qualities: ‘Rich, and rather strange, colour and a curious intensity of statement are characteristic of all his work.’