Leslie Hurry (1909-1978)

Leslie Hurry was born in London. He enrolled in the St John's School of Art in 1925, before winning a five-year scholarship to the Royal Academy, where he studied alongside his close friend, Mervyn Peake (1911-1968). Hurry held his first one-man show at the influential Wertheim Gallery in 1937. In 1940-41 - the period in which this work was painted - Hurry produced two books of intricate automatic drawings that were exhibited at the Redfern Gallery, leading to his acclaim as an 'ultra-surrealist'.

Hurry's emergence as an artist came at a time of hiatus with the British Surrealists, and so he never became an official member of the group. But while he worked in detachment from organised surrealism, his qualifications as a Surrealist are all too clear, with David Mellor instead referring to his work as 'psycho dramas'.