Leon Underwood (1890-1975)

Underwood visited Iceland in 1923, treking from Reykjavik to Husavik in the north, where he stayed with Blair Hughes-Stanton and Rodney Thomas in the local school. Underwood went to Iceland expecting to study indigenous art, but was rather disappointed by what he found. Neve comments 'Underwood found that the best course for him to take was to investigate, not so much their art, as the people themselves. The effect was that he began to paint less literally and to look increasingly for symbolic equivalents to express the humanity of his subject. The plum skies of the edge of the Artic Circle got into his palette, and he began to paint an idyll' (see C. Neve, Leon Underwood, London, 1974, p. 72).