Peter Purves-Smith

Peter Purves Smith had been a student at Geelong Grammar and a jackaroo before undertaking art studies at the Grosvenor School in London, the George Bell School in Melbourne and the Grande Chaumière in Paris.

He was an imaginative and inventive painter; the elongated figures and surrealist elements that Russell Drysdale was to extend in representations of the Australian landscape were present in his paintings of the late 1930s and early 1940s.

Purves Smith joined the British Army in 1940, served in West Africa and Burma, and died, after being invalided home, at the age of 37. Source: National Portrait Gallery, biography of Peter Purves-Smith