Rupert Lee

Born in Bombay, Lee studied at the Royal Academy Schools and the Slade, and was employed briefly by Gordon Craig before the outbreak of the First World War. Lee served in the Machine Gun Corps of the Queen's Westminster Rifles, and suffered shellshock in 1918. The drawings and paintings he produced whilst serving in the trenches show the influence of the Futurists and are Vorticist in style. After the war, he worked with Paul and John Nash producing wood engravings for The Poetry Bookshop and the Sun Calendar Yearbook. Around the same time, he began to specialize in animal subjects.

A member of the Friday Club, he joined the London Group in 1920 and was its President from 1926 to 1936. A champion of Roger Fry, he was art critic to the New Statesman, New Age, and Educational Times between 1921 and 1926. He turned to sculpture in the 1920s, and was involved with the open-air roof exhibition at Selfridges in 1930, and was Chairman of the International Surrealist exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries in 1936. He moved to Spain in 1946, and was killed in a motor accident there in 1959.