Laurie Lee, the author of Cider with Rosie, once said: “Best of all, after music, I like to draw.” Yet it was his writing, not his paintings, that made his name. “If they’d wanted my paintings, I’d be an artist now, earning lots of money, surrounded by beautiful girls,” he ruefully declared. After Lee’s death in 1997, his wife Kathy and daughter Jessy found a folder hidden under the bed in his study, containing previously unseen paintings and sketches. Next month, 31 works from that folder will go on show at the Works on Paper Fair (11-14 February, Royal Geographical Society)—Lee’s first public exhibition in London. They are on loan from Jessy Lee, who is a friend of the watercolours dealer Derek Newman (he has co-organised the show with Harry Moore-Gwyn). Laurie Lee considered becoming a professional painter following his return from Spain in 1936, and his patron Wilma Gregory supported him in a part-time course at Reading University. She thought him a precocious talent and recalled that “his fellow students called him ‘the English Picasso’”.