Beschreibung:

PORTRAIT OF JAMES BOTTERELL, 1926 William John Leech RHA ROI (1881-1968)
Signature: signed lower left Medium: oil on canvas Dimensions: 69 by 51cm., 27 by 20in. Provenance: By family descent Exhibited: RHA, Dublin, 1926, catalogue no. 11 (as "Jim") Literature: Denise Ferran, William John Leech An Irish Painter Abroad, NGI, Dublin, 1996, fig. 42, reproduced page 71 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. James Botterell was the eldest of the Botterell’s three children and he had remained at school in Winchester, England during the war years. Contemporary photographs show James (Jim) Botterell at Clayesmore School, Winchester, where he excelled at athletics and played the saxophone in the school’s band. Leech painted this portrait of him, c.1923, when he was a boarder at Winchester. A contemporary photograph of Jim1, taken at his mother’s apartment at 24 Hamilton Terrace, London, after she had moved out from the family home at Coombe-Edge, Hampstead, shows Jim as a tall, handsome young man, similar to the image captured by Leech in this portrait. As an artist, Leech had the ability to catch the likeness of his sitter as was the case in his portrait of Chloe Abbott in 1965, forty-three years later. Leech captures Jim, wiser beyond his years, resembling his father, in the shape of his head, the strength of his nose and forehead and the parting of his thick hair. He felt the break-up of his happy family home, very deeply, retaining a deep respect and love for his father and a love for his mother, a mood conveyed in this portrait. In conversation in the 1980s he recalled how vividly he remembered his mother’s visit to Winchester, when he was seventeen, to tell him of her new love affair and her intention to move out of the family home to Hamilton Terrace to be close to Leech’s studio in Hamilton Mews. However, May and Percy Botterell maintained a cordial relationship and family time was spent during the holidays at their large family home in Hampstead and later in the Botterell home in Burley in the New Forest, when Percy Botterell moved out of London. After his father’s death, Jim and his wife Eileen, still continued to entertain the couple at Burley for long visits, especially during May’s later illnesses. Dr Denise Ferran, March 200 more