Peter Purves Smith (1912–1949), artist, went to Geelong Grammar with his lifelong friend Russell Drysdale. He worked as a jackaroo for three years before undertaking art studies at the Grosvenor School in London. Back in Melbourne, he studied at the George Bell School where he met Maisie Mathews, who later became his wife. In 1938, Purves Smith left for Europe, where he painted major works including Kangaroo Hunt, acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, New York. He was an imaginative and inventive painter; the elongated figures and surrealist elements that Drysdale was to extend in representations of the Australian landscape were present in Purves Smith's paintings in the late 1930s and early 1940s. After proposing to Maisie, who had returned to Australia, Purves Smith joined the British Army in 1940 and served in West Africa and Burma until he was hospitalised with tuberculosis. He and Maisie married in 1946 in Melbourne, with Drysdale as best man; Purves Smith died following surgery to relieve his symptoms in 1949, at the age of 37.
