Painter, cabinetmaker and restorer of antique furniture was born in Footscray, Victoria son of a cabinetmaker from whom he learnt the trade. By eighteen Lander was foreman of a joinery workshop. He studied art at night at Gordon Technical College, Geelong, Victoria from 1909-14. His teacher was A. Anderson and his subjects included drawing, design for the applied arts, modelling and woodcarving. His friends included Arthur Streeton, McCubbin, Daryl Lindsay and others. Streeton told him to forget the detail in watercolour and concentrate on creating a mass effect.
Lander went to work for Buckley & Nunn in Melbourne before enlisting in 1915. He served at Gallipoli and the Western Front and was wounded twice but survived and opened a cabinet making and furniture restoration business in Toorak. About 1937 Lander decided to paint for a living and when World War II broke out he became a camouflage officer. In 1943 was transferred to Western Australia. His wife and family came too.
He and Allon Cook went on painting excursions together and exhibited together. Lander exhibited with the Perth Society of Artists in 1945, “a luminous study of water and boats, just as good as any in his just concluded show”. He exhibited watercolours and an oil painting in the 'Art Competition’ at Art Gallery of Western Australia in 1950. His entry in the Perth Prize for Contemporary Art in 1956 was a watercolour Winter Sky.
Lander won the Claude Hotchin Art Prize in 1957 and 1959 and the Bunbury Prize in 1959. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Artists of South Australia in 1946 and a member of the Australian Watercolour Institute in 1964. Lander exhibited regularly in South Australia and Tasmania.
His work was described by Charles Hamilton in the following way:
now and then he he gives us a bit of rich and strong hue and tone as we see in 'Canal Rocks’. He has the same deliberate procedure in working out his theme step by step as we may see in his demonstrations to students and amateurs. But his style is swift and confident if unhurried, and he seldom tinkers with a painting thereby setting a good example to his students.
Lander taught watercolour painting to adult education classes at the University of Western Australia in the 1960s. He had quite a following as the subject was not taught at Perth Technical College or the new art school at Western Australian Institute of Technology. Charles Hamilton wrote: “Lander’s influence on local painting rivals that of Linton and Benson, who directly and by example taught many of our painters to look for and select for themselves the material for their pictures, and to work hard at the techniques of painting through which they expressed themselves.”
