Leon George Claude Underwood was born at Shepherd’s Bush, London on 25 December 1890. He was the eldest of the three sons of Theodore George Black Underwood and Rose Ellen Cornelius. The previous three male generations of the Underwood family had been antiquaries and numismatists. George had an antique and print shop in Praed Street, Paddington. At the age of five, he attended St Michael’s Primary School, Paddington. He later attended Hampden Gurney Church of England School, until he left to work in his father’s shop. His duties mainly involved the copying and repairing of prints. In 1907 Underwood saw William Blake’s coloured engraving Glad Day and was deeply affected. That September, he moved to Goose Green, Dulwich and enrolled as full-time student at Regent Street Polytechnic under Percival Gaskel. A gifted sketcher, Underwood was awarded a scholarship to the RCA, where he studied under EC Alston, and painting under Gerald Moira. As a student, he visited Roger Fry’s (1910) Post-Impressionist exhibition at the Grafton Galleries, and while enthralled by the use of colour, judged the work neglectful of content. He felt that a neglect of subject matter was to the detriment of art, and that the embrace of abstraction for its own sake simply led to greater and greater differentiation between art and artists and an ordinary life as lived by the majority of folk. During the Great War, he worked in camouflage, eventually becoming a captain in the Sappers. In 1917 he married Mary Colman and submitted designs for repeating trench mortar to War Office. In 1919 he enrolled for year’s refresher course at the Slade and devoted himself almost exclusively to life-drawing under Henry Tonks. He became a Founder Member of Seven and Five Society and took up residence at 12 Girdler’s Road, off Brook Green, Hammersmith. He won a premium in the Rome Prize competition 1920, but instead of going out to Italy went to Iceland instead. He opened the Brook Green School of Drawing at his home. Notable pupils would include: Henry Moore, Eileen Agar, Blair Hughes-Stanton, and Gertrude Hermes. In 1920 he joined the staff of RCA as assistant teacher of life drawing, but resigned the post, after falling out with William Rothenstein in 1923. Underwood had his first one-man exhibition at the Chenil Galleries, Chelsea in 1922. Other exhibitions were held at the Alpine Club Gallery (1924) and the Leicester Galleries, London (1934). In 1926 he travelled to the USA to paint murals, but received no commissions. He returned to New York that May and began work as an illustrator for Brentano, John Day Company and on Vanity Fair. He also opened a private drawing school of the 8th Street West, Greenwich Village. In 1928 he travelled down the south-eastern shore of the Gulf of Mexico, up the rivers of Tabsco and over the Sierra Madre to the Pacific east of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, with Phillips Russell, studying Mayan and Aztec art. He reopened his drawing school in London in 1931 and founded the short-lived review magazine The Island, to which Henry Moore and Christopher Nevinson contributed. Underwood wrote many articles and several books. His Animalia a book of verse, and a novel The Siamese Cat, were both illustrated with woodcuts. He also wrote the treatise ‘Art for Heaven’s Sake: Notes on the Philosophy of Art To-Day’ (1934). He travelled widely, visiting Iceland, the cave paintings of Altamira in France, and Aztec and Mayan sites in Mexico. During his travels, he became fascinated with primitive art.  In ‘Art for Heaven’s Sake’ he argued that whilst abstract artists often turn to the primitive for inspiration, they as often miss its essential point: that it communicates to the masses, and does so with so much impact mainly because it avoids abstraction and  concentrates instead upon subject matter. During the Second World War, Underwood deployed his skills in camouflage at The Rink in Leamington Spa. In 1954 he painted the mural London Parks, for the Shell canteen at St Swithin’s House, St Swithin’s Lane, London EC4. In 1961 he received the Jean Masson Medal from the Society of Portrait Sculptors. In 1964 he became HRBS. A retrospective exhibition of his work was mounted at the Minories, Colchester in 1969. He died in London in 1975. Examples of his work may be seen in the V&A, the Tate Gallery, London; the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford; the National Museum and Gallery of Wales, Cardiff and the British Council Art Collection, London.