Norman Lindsay Watercolours 1897-1969 (Deluxe Edition)

BLOOMFIELD, Lin (illus. Norman Lindsay). Norman Lindsay Watercolours 1897–1969. Bungendore: Odana Editions, 2003.

Large 4to. Full slate Morocco. Covers and spine lettered and decorated in silver. [vi], 312 pp. 135 full-colour watercolour reproductions by Norman Lindsay throughout, drawn from public galleries and private collections across Australia. Limited First Edition. Limited to 550 numbered copies, of which 500 were made available for sale. Signed and numbered by the author to the front limitation page, this being copy 107.

Norman Lindsay (1879–1969) worked in more media and with more sustained energy than almost any other Australian artist of his generation: oil painting, etching, pen and ink, sculpture, ceramics, prose fiction, and the illustrated novel all occupied him at different times across a career that spanned seven decades. His watercolours, by contrast, have been somewhat overshadowed in the public record by his more notorious productions — the oils and etchings of Bacchanalian subjects that attracted censorship and controversy throughout his working life and that have tended to define the popular understanding of his art. This volume addresses that imbalance with considerable authority.

The 135 watercolours reproduced here, selected and documented by Lin Bloomfield from public galleries and private collections across Australia, cover the full arc of Lindsay's working life from 1897 to 1969 — from the earliest surviving student work of an eighteen-year-old in Creswick, through the long middle period at Faulconbridge in the Blue Mountains, to the works of his final years. The range of subject matter is characteristic of Lindsay's restless imagination: scenes from Greek and Roman mythology, Old Testament episodes rendered with the same absence of conventional piety he brought to everything, piracy and maritime adventure, figures from classical literature, and the figures — predominantly female, predominantly nude, predominantly at leisure in a landscape of Arcadian abundance — that recur throughout his work as embodiments of a particular aesthetic vision that Lindsay held with absolute consistency from his twenties to his death.

What the watercolour medium reveals about Lindsay that the etchings conceal is the quality of his colour sensibility. The etchings are masterworks of tonal control in black and white; the watercolours show a colourist of genuine subtlety, working with the translucency of the medium to achieve atmospheric effects quite different from those available to him in oil or in etching. Several of the works reproduced here are drawn from private collections and have rarely if ever been publicly exhibited, giving the volume documentary value beyond its appeal as a production object.

Lin Bloomfield, the author of the scholarly apparatus accompanying the reproductions, had a long association with the Lindsay family and is among the foremost authorities on his work. Odana Editions, the Bungendore-based specialist publisher whose productions in limited edition Australian art book publishing are consistently distinguished, produced the volume to a standard commensurate with its subject.

Fine. Slipcase with very minor rubbing at edges only. Book fine throughout, all contents present, bright, clean, and fresh.

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Catalogue Number: HH000088