William John Leech RHA ROI (1881-1968)
Self Portrait with Window and Table
Oil on board, 50 x 38cm (19¾ x 15'')
Signed
Taylor Gallery label verso
Listed as No.5 Self-portrait with window...

William John Leech RHA ROI (1881-1968)
Self Portrait with Window and Table
Oil on board, 50 x 38cm (19¾ x 15'')
Signed
Taylor Gallery label verso
Listed as No.5 Self-portrait with window and table in the list compiled by Leo Smith of paintings by W.J. Leech in his studio at Clandon, 5 September 1968, for Greenwood & Loryman.

Provenance: Accountants, London for death duty purposes by the Dawson Gallery, 4 Dawson St., Dublin 2.

When William (Bill) Leech, with his wife May Botterell, moved out of London to live at West Clandon, near Guildford in Surrey, in 1958, Leech was already in his late 70s. Moving into his newly built studio, in the garden, gave him renewed energy to paint and his subject matter was mainly his garden and his self-portraits. These Self-portraits depict Leech wearing his black hat, to cover his white and balding head, looking searchingly out towards the viewer, sitting posed in front of his Aloes series, painted in the 30s. He is questioning his lifes work as a painter.

In this Self-portrait Leech is not wearing his debonair black hat, but captures himself in his casual jacket and open neck shirt, framed by the lighted window onto the garden. Always aware compositionally, he sits to the right, with the edge of the table forming a strong diagonal towards the upright metal bar of the window. Clothes draped casually over the edge of the chair to the left and the green ceramic vase with its darker green plant, all create his studio environment.

Leechs searching expression is now more haunted, with a hint of despair, perhaps reflecting on his long life as a painter, during which he did not achieve the promise of his early success. When he wrote to Leo Smith, of the Dawson Gallery in 1966, he recognized this failure; You see not much success really but you cannot be a recluse all your life as I have been and have worldly success. I had an idea when young, that if the work was good enough it would sell in the end. The end is the word

This is one of the last Self-portraits Leech painted and it maintains all the dexterity and skill the painter possessed. When his second wife May died on 10th July 1963, aged eighty-three years, Leech was a very lonely man and 5 years later on 16th July 1968 at age eighty-eight, after being diagnosed as terminally ill, Leech fell from the railway bridge at West Clandon onto the tracks below.

Dr Denise Ferran
August 2021

 

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