John Lees’s oneiric landscapes and portraits are haunted. And not only by his acknowledged sources, Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Fauves like Rouault and Dufy, the precursors of Expressionism, the niche to which Lees is usually assigned. There are other ghosts, especially the mysterious landscapes of Samuel Palmer, themselves channels for the otherworldly works of William Blake. So, Lees is a strange kind of Romantic who finds himself painting in the twenty-first century.