Derrick Sayer studied at Chelsea School of Art under Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland. He founded the Mousehole Group Art School in 1936 with George Lamborn and Guy Allen. This was a short lived venture, and Sayer turned to graphic work for advertising campaigns and book illustrations. In 1966 he became a lecturer at Chelsea and Westminster Adult Education Institute where he remained until his retirement as Head of Art in 1982. Sayer exhibited throughout his life at the Redfern Gallery, Leicester Gallery and the New Art Centre, amongst others. His work owed much to Ben Nicholson’s linear abstraction and to the Neo-Romantics sense of man in nature