Lloyd Frederic Rees (17 March 18952 December 1988) was an Australian landscape painter who twice won the

Wynne Prize The Wynne Prize is an Australian landscape painting or figure sculpture art prize. As one of Australia's longest-running art prizes, it was established in 1897 from the bequest of Richard Wynne. Now held concurrently with the Sir John Sulman Prize ...

for his landscape paintings. Most of Rees's works are preoccupied with depicting the effects of light and emphasis is placed on the harmony between man and nature. Rees's oeuvre is dominated by sketches and paintings, in which the most frequent subject is the built environment in the landscape.

Life and training

Rees was born in

Brisbane Brisbane ( ) is the capital and most populous city of the Australian state of Queensland, and the third-most populous city in Australia and Oceania, with a population of approximately 2.6 million. Brisbane lies at the centre of the South ...

Queensland ) , nickname = Sunshine State , image_map = Queensland in Australia.svg , map_caption = Location of Queensland in Australia , subdivision_type = Country , subdivision_name = Australia , established_title = Before federation , establishe ...

, the seventh of eight children of Owen Rees and his wife Angèle Burguez,Art Gallery of New South Wales, Lloyd Rees, the Sketchbooks, 2002, http://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/sub/rees/biography.html , retrieved July 2007 who was half

Mauritian Mauritians (singular Mauritian; french: Mauricien; Creole: ''Morisien'') are nationals or natives of the Republic of Mauritius and their descendants. Mauritius is a multi-ethnic society, with notable groups of people of South Asian (notably ...

, half Cornish. Rees attended Ironside State School

Ironside State School Ironside State School is a heritage-listed state school at 378 Swann Road, St Lucia, City of Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. It was built from 1935 to 1959. It was added to the Queensland Heritage Register on 27 July 2018. History Ironside ...

and

Ithaca Creek State School Ithaca Creek State School is a heritage-listed state school and war memorial at 49 Lugg Street, Bardon, City of Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. It was designed by Queensland Department of Public Work (involving Andrew Baxter Leven, Nigel L ...

in Brisbane's inner west. After formal art training at Brisbane's

Central Technical College The City and Guilds of London Institute is an educational organisation in the United Kingdom. Founded on 11 November 1878 by the City of London and 16 livery companies – to develop a national system of technical education, the institute has ...

, he commenced work as a commercial artist in 1917. Lloyd Rees, 1916

Rees was engaged to sculptor Daphne Mayo, but it was broken off in 1925. He married Dulcie Metcalf in 1926. In 1927 Dulcie died in childbirth and Rees married again, in 1931, to Marjory Pollard, mother to his son Alan. Rees' wife died on 14 April 1988 and he died on 2 December of the same year. From the 1940s until the 1960s Rees was part of the Northwood group, a small group of friends who would go on painting excursions around Sydney Harbor and northwestern Sydney. Regulars of the Northwood group were Lloyd Rees,

Roland Wakelin Roland Wakelin (17 April 1887 – 28 May 1971) was a New Zealand-born Australian painter and teacher. Early life Roland Shakespeare Wakelin was born on 17 April 1887 in Greytown, New Zealand. He studied at Wellington Technical School from 190 ...

, George ''Feather'' Lawrence and John Santry. Douglas Dundas, Wilmotte Williams and Marie Santry also associated with the Northwood group. These artists had no manifesto but were conservative, tending towards a neoimpressionist style of landscape painting with sinuous linework. In 1937 Rees became a foundation member of, and exhibited with, Robert Menzies' anti-modernist organisation, the

Australian Academy of Art The Australian Academy of Art was a conservative Australian government-authorised art organisation which operated for ten years between 1937 and 1946 and staged annual exhibitions. Its demise resulted from opposition by Modernist artists, especiall ...

. In the 1960s the Northwood Group was active during the modishness of Sydney abstract expressionism, their noted contemporaries were the Merioola Group and stalwart Melbourne postwar voices of disquiet such as Sidney Nolan and the Antipodeans. By the 1970s a young

postmodern art Postmodern art is a body of art movements that sought to contradict some aspects of modernism or some aspects that emerged or developed in its aftermath. In general, movements such as intermedia, installation art, conceptual art and multimedia, ...

scene emerged in

Gallery A Gallery A was a mid-century Australian gallery that exhibited contemporary Australian art. It was established in 1959 at 60 Flinders Lane, Melbourne, and then relocated to 275 Toorak Road., South Yarra. A second Gallery A venue was opened and run ...

Macquarie Galleries Macquarie Galleries was a Sydney private art gallery established in 1925 by John Henry Young and Basil Burdett. It was located at "Strathkyle", 19 Bligh Street Sydney then moved to 40 King Street in 1945. From 1991 to 1993 it was located at ...

, and Watters Gallery. Celebrated painter

Brett Whiteley Brett Whiteley AO (7 April 1939 – 15 June 1992) was an Australian artist. He is represented in the collections of all the large Australian galleries, and was twice winner of the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman prizes. He held many exhibitio ...

was a member of this younger generation rediscovering the now elderly painter and drawer Lloyd Rees. Friend and Northwood resident William Pidgeon painted Lloyd Rees portrait which won the 1968

Archibald Prize The Archibald Prize is an Australian portraiture art prize for painting, generally seen as the most prestigious portrait prize in Australia. It was first awarded in 1921 after the receipt of a bequest from J. F. Archibald, the editor ...

. Following Rees's death, Alan Rees and his wife Jancis gave to the Art Gallery of NSW all of Rees's surviving sketchbooks.Hendrik Kolenberg, ''Lloyd Rees in Europe'', Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2002, p. 18

Europe

Rees first travelled to Europe in the 1920s (to meet with his then fiancée Daphne Mayo) and made sketches, including many of Paris, which were left accidentally on a bus in London at that time. While some of his works - and indeed his betrothal to Mayo - were lost, his connection with the landscapes of town and country France and Italy was to last a lifetime. Rees visited Europe again in 1953, 1959, 1966–67 and 1973, painting and sketching on all of his journeys. The sketchbooks are now held by the Art Gallery of New South Wales, comprising approximately 700 images in pencil, carbon pencil, wash, watercolour and ballpoint pen. They reveal a capacity to characterize the texture and light of landscapes in these brief media - concerns that are equally evident in his paintings throughout his career.

Late works

Rees painted right up to his death at age 93. His works of the last one to two decades in particular showed a preoccupation with the spiritual dimension of the relationship with and portrayal of the landscape, and this became the focus of the final book prepared in cooperation with the author Renée Free: ''Lloyd Rees: the last twenty years''. His late works show an abstraction of form and a focus on the source and effects of light on the landscape, such as in his work ''The Sunlit Tower'', painted when he was 91 years old, and winner of the Jack Manton Prize for 1987 (a prize awarded by the Queensland Art Gallery). He claimed that one of the benefits of his failing eyesight in his old age was that he could look directly at the sun. Rees's own philosophical views he expressed in the Epilogue to their book:

From quite an early age I was overwhelmed with the fact of endlessness... Planetary systems can blow up, but the universe is endless, and our little life is set in the midst of this, and everything in it has a beginning and an end...
his His or HIS may refer to: Computing * Hightech Information System, a Hong Kong graphics card company * Honeywell Information Systems * Hybrid intelligent system * Microsoft Host Integration Server Education * Hangzhou International School, in ...
gives to life a sense of mystery that is always with me.

Honours

Rees won the

in 1950 and 1982. He also won the Commonwealth Jubilee Art Prize in 1957 and in 1971 he won the

John McCaughey Memorial Art Prize The John McCaughey Prize, also known as the John McCaughey Memorial Art Prize, McCaughey Prize, McCaughey Art Prize or McCaughey Art Award, is an Australian art prize awarded to an artist or artists, under which the National Gallery of Victoria ...

and the International Cooperation Art Award. Rees was appointed a Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George (CMG) in 1978 and Australia's highest civilian honour, Companion of the

Order of Australia The Order of Australia is an honour that recognises Australian citizens and other persons for outstanding achievement and service. It was established on 14 February 1975 by Elizabeth II, Queen of Australia, on the advice of the Australian Gov ...

(AC) in 1985. He was awarded the Médaille de la Ville de Paris in 1987 in honour of his artistic achievements.National Portrait Gallery
Lloyd Rees From Behind (Max Dupain
, retrieved July 2007 For forty years, from 1946 to 1986, Rees taught art with Sydney University's Faculty of Architecture and in 1988 received the Sydney University Union Medal for his contributions to art and the University. In the same year he was named as one of the Australian Bicentennial Authority's ''Two hundred people who made Australia great''.

Collections

* Art Gallery of New South Wales *

Art Gallery of Western Australia The Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA) is a public art gallery that is part of the Perth Cultural Centre, in Perth. It is located near the Western Australian Museum and State Library of Western Australia and is supported and managed by the ...

*Darling Harbour Authority *

Parliament House, Canberra Parliament House, also referred to as Capital Hill or simply Parliament, is the meeting place of the Parliament of Australia, and the seat of the legislative branch of the Australian Government. Located in Canberra, the Parliament building is ...

National Gallery of Australia The National Gallery of Australia (NGA), formerly the Australian National Gallery, is the national art museum of Australia as well as one of the largest art museums in Australia, holding more than 166,000 works of art. Located in Canberra in th ...

Newcastle Art Gallery The Newcastle Art Gallery (formerly the Newcastle City Art Gallery, Newcastle Region Art Gallery) is a large, public art museum in Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia. History Founded in 1945 with an art collection consisting of 123 works ...

Queensland Art Gallery The Queensland Art Gallery (QAG) is an art museum located in South Bank, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. The gallery is part of QAGOMA. It complements the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) building, situated only away. The Queensland Art Galler ...

*Royal Australian College of Physicians *

Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery The Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG) is a museum located in Hobart, Tasmania. The museum was established in 1846, by the Royal Society of Tasmania, the oldest Royal Society outside England. The TMAG receives 400,000 visitors annually. ...

University of Sydney The University of Sydney (USYD), also known as Sydney University, or informally Sydney Uni, is a public research university located in Sydney, Australia. Founded in 1850, it is the oldest university in Australia and is one of the country's ...

University of Western Australia The University of Western Australia (UWA) is a public research university in the Australian state of Western Australia. The university's main campus is in Perth, the state capital, with a secondary campus in Albany and various other facilitie ...

*West Australian Institute of Technology

Footnotes

References

Edward Duyker Edward Duyker (born 21 March 1955) is an Australian historian, biographer and author born in Melbourne. Edward Duyker's books include several ethno-histories – ''Tribal Guerrillas'' (1987), ''The Dutch in Australia'' (1987) and ''Of the Star ...

, ‘Lloyd Rees: Artist and Teacher’, ''Arts: The Journal of the Sydney University Arts Association'', vol. 30, 2008, pp. 34–53. *Renée Free, ''Lloyd Rees'', Landsdowne, Melbourne, 1972 *Renée Free and Lloyd Rees, ''Lloyd Rees: The Last Twenty Years'', Craftsman House, Sydney, 1990 *Janet Hawley, 'Lloyd Rees: the final interview', ''Sydney Morning Herald - Good Weekend Magazine'', 15 October 1988 *Lou Klepac, ''Lloyd Rees Drawings'', Australian Artist Editions, Sydney, 1978 *Hendrik Kolenberg, ''Lloyd Rees in Europe'', Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney, 2002 *Lloyd Rees, ''Peaks and valleys: an autobiography'', Collins, Sydney, 1985

External links

Lloyd Rees
at the Art Gallery of New South Wales
National Gallery of Australia

Lloyd Rees at Australian Art

Lloyd Rees: Queensland Art Gallery 1998 exhibition review by Grafico Topico's Sue Smith

Lloyd Rees "Coming Home" Rockhampton Art Gallery exhibition 1999
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Rees, Lloyd 1895 births 1988 deaths Australian people of Mauritian descent Australian people of Cornish descent Companions of the Order of Australia Australian Companions of the Order of St Michael and St George Wynne Prize winners 20th-century Australian painters 20th-century male artists Australian landscape painters Australian male painters Australian commercial artists