William John Leech

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.

William John Leech studied at National College of Art and Design and St Columba's College, Dublin. Subjects and genres recorded for the work are portrait. Work by William John Leech is recorded in the collections of National Gallery of Ireland, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa and Ulster Museum.

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. In 1901, with the support of Osborne, Leech left Dublin for Paris to enrol at the Académie Julian in Paris, where he studied under William-Adolphe Bouguereau who emphasised "restrained brushwork" and "finish", and later under Jean-Paul Laurens, who emphasised use of colour. While in Paris, he shared accommodation with the New Zealand artist Sydney Thompson, who would become a lifelong friend of Leech.

Leech returned to Dublin in 1902 but in 1903 left to join his friend Thompson in the French sea-side town of Concarneau in Brittany, which had an established "artistic colony". Leech was largely based at Concarneau from 1903 to 1910, and during that period his artistic style developed markedly. He started with "formal academic 'brown studies' in dark Dutch style with a restricted palette of earth tones, with notable examples being Interior of a café (1908) and Le Café des artistes–Concarneau, which was awarded a bronze medal at the 1914 salon of the Societe des Artists. By the end of the period, Leech had completely transitioned to "landscapes in Whistlerian subdued tonalities", and was using a "bright post-impressionist palette". Leech's portraits were considered too realistic and unforgiving to make him a "society portrait painter", however, his French landscapes and shop and cafe interiors won him numerous Royal Dublin Society Taylor prizes and scholarships, and established him as an important emerging Irish artist. On his first return to Dublin from Brittany in 1906, he was embraced into the artistic circle of George Russell (A.E.), Constance Gore-Booth and her husband Casimir Dunin Markievicz. Leech exhibited nearly seventy paintings with them in a group exhibition at the Leinster Lecture Hall in August 1907 and was praised by the noted critic, Thomas Bodkin. In December 1909, Leech exhibited with Jack Yeats, Albert Power, Eva Hamilton, William Orpen, Lily Williams, A.E., Constance Gore-Booth and Dermod O’Brien, in the first Aonach art exhibition, organised by Sinn Féin as part of the Irish Festival at the Rotunda. In 1910, he became a full member of the Royal Hibernian Academy, but then followed his parents who were relocating to London.

• Illustration — A Convent Garden, Brittany (1913) During late 1910, Leech toured Europe painting landscapes, and particularly the Aosta Valley in Italy and Lake Constance in Switzerland. He also rented a large house outside Concarneau with an affluent American married artist, Saurin Elizabeth Kerlin née Smith (1879–c1951), with whom Leech had begun an affair. After Elizabeth's divorce was finalised, they married in June 1912 at the Fulham registry office and lived with Leech's parents in London, but continuously visited Concarneau. It was in this period, with Elizabeth as the subject, that Leech painted some of his most notable works, including the Girl with a Tinsel Scarf (1912), A Convent Garden, Brittany (1913) with its "acid-green" colouring, The Sunshade (1913), and The Cigarette (1915). 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.

In about 1919, Leech was commissioned by a London solicitor Percy Dumville Botterell (1880–1950), to paint a portrait of his wife May née Pearson (1881–1965). Leech painted a sharp black-and-white portrait of May titled Dame en noir, followed by Portrait bleu, which won a bronze medal at the 1922 Paris Salon. May quickly became Leech's lover and model, which finally ended his relationship with Elizabeth. May used a family allowance to move to a house in London near Leech, however they kept the relationship private, and only married in 1953 after the deaths of both Elizabeth and of Percy. Leech and Botterwell travelled frequently together and particularly to the south of France and Nice, where Leech continued to paint. Return trips to Concarneau were made, often with his friend Thompson, and Leech also painted female nudes in watercolours with Botterell as subject. In 1925-26, Leech made his first and only sculpture, a bronze casting of May's head. By the late 1930s, a lack of sales and money, amplified by the privacy under which Leech and Botterell were living, forced Leech to remain in England, painting landscapes in Devon and Kent and scenes in London. A series of major exhibitions in Dublin in 1945, 1947 and 1951, organised by Leo Smith in the Dawson Street Gallery revived interest in Leech's works and his energy and enthusiasm for painting. In 1958, Leech and May moved to the Tudor-style Candy Cottage in West Clandon in Surrey, where Leech continued to work. In 1965, May died of bronchial pneumonia which drove Leech into a depression. In July 1968, Leech was badly injured from a fall in a possible suicide attempt on West Clandon railway bridge, but Leech succumbed to his injuries shortly after.