Clifford Bayliss 1912-1989 Surrealist drawings and mixed media paintings 1940s-50s

Clifford Bayliss born 1912, Footscray and died 1989, London. He attended the National Gallery School in the early 30s and could draw like Leonardo, was a bohemian and very poor. He was an artist who worked continuously and obsessively throughout his life, but rarely exhibited. A mentor to many younger artists at the National Gallery School including Sidney Nolan, John Sinclair and Oswald Hall. He won the School's travelling scholarship in 1935 and left Australia, never to return.

The scholarship put Bayliss on the front page of The Herald with the headline "Romance of Art Award - Nomad Winner" and in every major paper at the time; The Argus, "Success despite poverty" interviewed his close friend Arthur Read, "In every way he is the poor young art student of fiction, brought into real life. His five years of art training have been one long struggle against lack of money, but he loved the work so much that he just had to succeed."

Australia's most renowned art historian Bernard Smith intoduced me to the Bayliss estate in 1993. In the foreword to our first exhibition in 1995 he described Bayliss as "a kind of Ern Malley, deeply burnt by his time, but a real Malley this time" and "an expatriate of distinction that we should know more about than we do. Examples of his work should be in all our public galleries."

Since 1995, we have sold at least 33 works by Bayliss to major public galleries.