B. 1906 – 1966

William Leonard Annois, better known as Len Annois, was an Australian artist celebrated for his landscape watercolours and drawings. Born in Melbourne, he began his career as an engineer and was then a cement salesman, only coming to art after he lost his job during the Great Depression.  

Annois was an active participant in Melbourne’s art scene, serving on the board of the Victorian Artists Society, producing the magazine ‘Australian Artist’, helping to establish the National Gallery Society of Victoria and serving as an illustrator with the Australian air force during World War Two. He was esteemed for his visions of Melbourne suburbia which played close attention to where the city meets nature, finding notes of the European landscape. 

A true gourmet, Annois’s life abruptly ended at a Toorak dinner party, leaving a formidable legacy in his wake. He was the winner of the Wynne Prize, posthumously likened by Australian art historian Patrick McCaughey to another poet of the landscape, Fred Williams, and collected extensively by the National Gallery of Victoria.