Beschreibung:

MAY BOTTERELL William John Leech RHA ROI (1881-1968)
Signature: signed lower right Medium: pencil Dimensions: 13¼ x 14¼in. (33.66 x 36.20cm) Provenance: Collection of George and Maura McClelland Exhibited: Literature: William John Leech met the Botterell family in London in 1919, at the end of the First World War, on his return from painting in France and the Botterell family’s return from Holland. Percy Botterell,... , an eminent London lawyer had been a commercial attaché to The Hague during the war, and through his wife May, they had met Leech’s older brother, Cecil. Cecil Leech had fought in the First World War, as a commissioned officer in the Royal Horse Artillery. He had spent four years in a prisoner of war camp and as a released prisoner met May Botterell in Holland, where she had organised a relief centre for released prisoners, providing clothes, money and information to aid prisoners on their return home. It was Cecil Leech who, on his return to London, organised the meeting between the Botterell family and the Leech family and it was Percy Botterell who commissioned W. J. Leech to paint portraits of himself, his wife, May and his three children, James, Guy and Suzanne. This meeting and the painting of May’s portrait was to change the Botterell family life irrevocably and was to begin the lifelong relationship between May Botterell and W. J. Leech, which culminated in their wedding in 1953, after the deaths of Percy Botterell in 1951 and Leech’s wife Elizabeth, in 1950. Dr. Denise Ferran FIGURATIV more