William John Leech

William John Leech (10 April 1881 – 16 July 1968) was an Irish painter and impressionist. Developed and encouraged by Walter Osborne, Leech came to critical attention for his landscapes and interiors, particularly those in Concarneau in Brittany. He is better known today for his works that feature his first wife, Saurin Elizabeth, and which include A Convent Garden, Brittany and The Sunshade (1913). Leech was once mistakenly attributed as the artist for The Goose Girl. Leech's painted works never achieved the public attention that critics believed they merited, a fact partly attributed – even by Leech himself – to his highly reclusive nature, and also to his need for personal privacy due to his second relationship with May Botterell.

Early life and education

Leech was born on the 10th of April 1881 in Parnell Square in Dublin, the son of Anne Louisa née Garbois (1847–1921) and the Trinity Law Professor, Henry Brougham Leech (1843–1921). He went to school at St Columba's College, and in 1899 enrolled at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art. Rejecting the normal career route of becoming an art teacher, in 1900, he transferred to the Royal Hibernian Academy to further study under major Irish artists and particularly Walter Osborne, who Leech credited as teaching him everything that he "needed to know about painting".

By 1901, Leech had perfected his use of Osbourne's techniques of "drawing directly in paint on the canvas", and the "bold use of impasto combined with flickering light and shade", and "a late predilection for watercolour". Leech was also influenced by Nathaniel Hone and his small outdoor paint sketches to capture light and colour that were scaled up in the studio, and by James McNeill Whistler and his techniques of balancing of tones and colours. By the end of the period, Leech had completely transitioned to "landscapes in Whistlerian subdued tonalities", In A Convent Garden, Elizabeth poses as a novice of the Daughters of the Holy Spirit in the walled garden of their hospital at Concarneau, where Leech had once convalesced.

While they would begin to separate after two years of marriage, Elizabeth remained an important person in Leech's life until about 1919. She fulfilled the roles of wife, artist model and source of income (from her private wealth). When Leech was called up in 1918 for national service his marriage was falling apart. Leech returned from his service in the army both penniless and suffering from depression, which resulted in an acute state of artist's block. Leech's best-known works remain that of his first wife, Elizabeth, and include A Convent Garden, Brittany (1913) and The Sunshade (1913), both of which hang in the NGI. In 2012, a national poll conducted by Ireland's State broadcaster, RTÉ, listed A Convent Garden, Brittany in the top ten of "Ireland's Favourite Painting".

In 2013, Franch art historian Claudine Dauphin, writing in the Dictionary of Irish Biography, said of Leech, "Lack of sales and hence of success made him the most neglected of Irish artists, owing a facile popularity to three paintings in the NGI (In a convent garden, The sunshade, and The goose girl (the last attributed to Stanley Royle in 1996)), but his versatility (which commands admiration) was largely unrecognised". Dauphin added that, "In fact, he was one of the most important and complex Irish artists of the modern era. He epitomises Irish painting from the Edwardian period to the mid-twentieth century, combining the teachings of the old masters with the innovations of the impressionists and post-impressionists, and absorbing the influences of British painters while developing an ever-changing, dynamic, and personal art".