Father Desmond Macready Chute (1895–1962) was an English artist, who became a Catholic priest in 1927. He was born in Bristol, where his father James Macready Chute ran the family theatre. He was educated at Downside School, and the Slade Art School in London.
He was an intimate and influential friend of Stanley Spencer, from 1915
From 1918 became a close colleague and assistant of Eric Gill and was involved with The Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic publishing poetry in The Game, the community's magazine.
He became also a convinced distributist and follower of Vincent McNabb, to whom he and Eric Gill were introduced in 1914 by influential friends Marc-Andre Raffalovich and John Gray. He started in 1921 to study for the priesthood, in Fribourg. Later he moved for his health to Rapallo, where he was a friend of Ezra Pound, and one of the Tigullian Circle clique around him. He tutored Mary de Rachewiltz, Pound's daughter with Olga Rudge. In 1944, he was interned by the Germans in the monastery at Bobbio, Genoa and had to walk back home across the mountains.
His radio play Poets in Paradise was broadcast by the BBC in 1955. He died in Rapallo. Some of his papers are held in the Eric Gill Collection at Chichester; others by his relation, David Charles Manners.