Eric Albert Lee-Johnson

Place: Suva

Born: 1908

Death: 1993

Biography:

Eric Albert Lee-Johnson was a New Zealand artist and photographer. He was born in Suva, Fiji in 1908 and moved to New Zealand in 1912 with his parents. He showed an unusual gift for drawing as a child and attended Auckland's Elam School of Art from 1923 to 1926. He joined newspaper publishers Wilson & Horton’s printing department at the age of 18 and became one of New Zealand’s first wholly nationalist painters, one of the first to reject Europe’s models. He is recognized for his slightly surreal landscape paintings and his contribution to modernism in New Zealand. Lee-Johnson died in 1993.