WILLIAM John Leech was due in fact overdue, a large and authoritative exhibition and the National Gallery appears to have come up with precisely that. Leech has been dead since 1968 and the centenary of his birth fell in 1981, so there is no obvious anniversary to hang it on; but Yeats, Lavery, Orpen, Roderic O'Conor, Swanzy, Osborne, Hone have all been honoured posthumously with impressive exhibitions, and he belongs indisputably in their company.
Nobody can claim that Leech is an undiscovered painter. After all, he has been represented for decades in most public collections in this country, and although he lived overseas for most of his life - first in France then later in England - he sent occasional pictures to the RHA exhibitions and kept a footing in the Dawson Gallery run by the late Leo Smith. Yet he is rather like a reef with some areas showing above the water, and the rest of it out of sight. We feel we know him and roughly have his measure as an artist, yet probably the bulk of his work has never been seen here.
In many or most respects Leech belonged very much to Anglo-Ireland, socially and artistically. He was the son of a Trinity law lecturer and England was the country he eventually settled in; it is rather hard to imagine him feeling at home in the Ireland of de Valera. Even his departure as a young man to Paris is in keeping with this background, after learning the basics of his craft in Dublin from Osborne and Hone. He worked (almost inevitably) at Concarneau in Brittany, met and married his first wife (an American) in Paris, and later lived for many years with a married woman, May Botterell, whom he married finally in 1953. His death five years after hers, was as a result of falling off a railway bridge in what was possibly a suicide attempt. For most of his life he appears to have had some private means, and there is something ineradicably of the gentleman-artist about him, as there was about Nat Hone or Roderic O'Conor.
WE NEED not look for an innovatory genius; in essence Leech was a relatively traditional painter, though never a hidebound academic, or backward-looking. He belonged very broadly to the international plein-airist style, and though he obviously learned from Impressionism, he tended to work with warm-toned shadows rather than the blue-grey, transparent tones of Monet and Pissarro. He was an excellent technician, and an adept watercolourist when he chose to be, but the National Gallery includes no drawings as such. Leech sketchbooks presumably must exist, though I have never seen one. (There are, of course, many small oil sketches, presumably done premier coup).
One large, full-length portrait of a soldier-relative shows him trying his hand at the kind of professional portraiture which Osborne had to produce for his bread and butter. It is fully competent but untypical, and although Leech later became a sensitive painter of women (and, sometimes, of children) portraiture in the strict sense was not his forte or his interest. The early Concarneau pictures - cafe scenes, interiors etc, - are solidly painted and generally dark in tone, though there is one superb painting of the harbour there, dated 1908, which skilfully contrasts the cool tones of the sea in the foreground with a warm strip of sunlight falling on the quays. From the very start, Leech possessed the inborn talent of depicting water well.
His tonality gradually grew brighter after this, with much out-of-doors painting, and one of the highlights of the exhibition are the three monumental - and slightly sinister - canvases of bitter-aloes plants, massive and spiky, painted at Les Martigues in the South of France. The familiar Un Matin in the Hugh Lane Gallery is one of the trio, but in my opinion it is by no means the best. There are a number of beach scenes, in which the incandescent light almost eats up everything else, and various Southern French views and landscapes, some of them painted from highly unorthodox angles. A little later, he seems to have gone through a kind of brief quasi-Oriental phase - possibly influenced by Whistler?
THE English pictures of his later years are, in general, rather more conventional in vision, and sometimes rather pale in tone, but there is no falling off in terms of sheer quality. Leech remained, almost to the very end, a very good painter, and to the end he experimented in his angles of composition, varying them in a way which suggests he had learned from Vuillard and Cezanne (his sharp diagonals are particularly effective).
Interiors, flower pieces, still-life subjects, light-filled views of his garden make up the bulk of this late work, though sensitive depictions of his second wife also figure prominently. There are also some London scenes and at least one fine self-portrait, done in his seventies. Leech also made highly original use of the "window" motif, so that indoor and outdoor worlds offset each other in a kind of imaginative simultaneity. As his life narrowed inwards he increasingly chose simple, everyday, even hackneyed themes or objects, achieving a special kind of intimisme. The very last pictures included show, ominously and prophetically, railway lines and a railway bridge.
The National Gallery exhibition is a large one and it has been carefully chosen, with many unfamiliar works from private collections. (Personally I am glad to see a minimum of the rather banal studio nudes which form my least favourite portion of his output). Denise Ferran's long labours on the catalogue are fully justified by the result, showing in the round an artist who was never a revolutionary, but who had taste, high intelligence and disciplined industry and who seems to have been incapable of painting badly. Leech was a realist, not a visionary or symbolist, but he was a "poetic realist," who poured his imagination into familiar sights and things.
