125 stories for 125 years

Leonard Annois

Leonard Lloyd Annois (1906-1966) was born on 1 July 1906 at Malvern, Melbourne. Educated at Melbourne High School, at 17 Len began an engineering career. On 17 February 1928 he married Mavis Martha Nunn who belonged to the Victorian Potters’ Group.

He attended classes at the National Gallery schools. In 1935 Annois found employment with G. J. Coles & Co. Ltd and in 1946 was appointed manager of the new advertising department. Throughout these years he continued painting and exhibiting. After studying English water-colour he turned to landscape. In 1942-43 Annois worked as a production illustrator with the Directorate of Armoured Fighting Vehicles and the Commonwealth Aircraft Corporation Pty Ltd.

After the war he joined the council of the Victorian Artists Society and engaged in the production of a new magazine, the Australian Artist. He was a foundation member of the committee which established the National Gallery Society of Victoria. In 1950 he made the first of several journeys abroad. In Italy he studied frescoes and brought his skills to Melbourne where he executed murals in fresco secco in such buildings as the Pharmacy College of Victoria, Parkville, St John's Church of England, Camberwell, and Melbourne High School.

Nigel Manning and Joe Cobcroft described Annois as ‘a big man; six feet four inches tall and weighing sixteen stone, with a mind no less impressive than his physical presence. When he entered a room full of people, his personality seemed to radiate and penetrate into every corner’. The work on the Sissons Mural occupied Annois for almost three years and he spent more than 18 months painting it. Manning and Cobcroft considered the physical exertion for a man of his build in working on the enormous scaffolding to be a ‘gruelling task from which he probably never fully recovered’.

From 1935 Annois had exhibited widely and regularly at the Victorian Artists Society, the New Melbourne Art Club, the Athenaeum gallery and interstate; he held his first one-man show at Tye's Gallery in Bourke Street in 1941. He was elected associate (1952) and member (1958) of the Royal Society of Painters in Watercolour, and in 1960 became president of the National Gallery Society of Victoria. He won awards for his water-colours throughout Australia, among them the Wynne prize (1961 and 1964).

A bon vivant, Annois was a gourmet, a cricket fan and a bird-lover. Survived by his wife, son and daughter, he died suddenly at a friend’s dinner party at Toorak on 10 July 1966. In 1969 a posthumous exhibition of his water-colours of Central Australia (inspired by a visit made in 1964) was held in Melbourne.