The Life and Work of Sydney Long (First Deluxe Edition)

MENDELSSOHN, Joanna. The Life and Work of Sydney Long. Sydney: Copperfield Publishing, 1979.

Tall, thick 4to. Full red-brown crushed Morocco leather. Titling to cover and spine in gilt. Spine with four raised bands, margined in gilt. Publisher's stamp in gilt to lower spine compartment. Blue endpapers. 284, [ii] pp. Numerous plates throughout, many tipped-in, including a large folding double-page plate to the rear. First Edition. Limited Deluxe Edition. Signed and numbered to the title page. One of 275 copies, this being number 184. Plates remain glossy, vivid, and fine.

Sydney Long (1871–1955) occupies a singular position in the history of Australian art: he was the painter who took the bush, that most resolutely Australian of subjects, and refracted it through the lens of European Symbolism and Art Nouveau, producing in the process images unlike anything that had been seen before in this country. Where his contemporaries at the Heidelberg School — Roberts, Streeton, McCubbin — were engaged in rendering the Australian landscape with the clear-eyed directness of the plein-air tradition, Long was asking a different question: what would happen if Pan came to the eucalyptus forest? What would happen if the spirit presiding over the Australian bush were not a weather-beaten selector or a drover's wife but a nude figure playing pipes while children danced in the heat haze beneath the gum trees?

His answer was Pan (1898), the painting that made his reputation and that remains his best-known work: a panoramic horizontal canvas in which a young woman plays pan-pipes in a luminous golden landscape of native grasses and silhouetted eucalypts, while a procession of distant nude figures moves across the middle ground in a sinuous, decorative line. The work won the Wynne Prize — awarded for the best landscape painting of the year — and announced a sensibility that was both authentically Australian in its observation of light and country, and thoroughly international in its awareness of what Gustave Moreau and the Pre-Raphaelites and the Vienna Secession were doing to the figure in landscape. Long won the Wynne Prize four times in total, a record that reflects the consistency and the depth of his engagement with the Australian landscape as a subject over more than a decade of sustained production.

From approximately 1906 Long turned primarily to etching and printmaking, and the Sydney Harbour etchings and drypoints he produced over the following decades constitute an equally significant body of work — meticulous, atmospheric, technically accomplished — that is now highly sought after in the print market. He taught at East Sydney Technical College for many years, shaping several generations of Australian artists, and remained a respected figure in Sydney's art world until his death in 1955.

Joanna Mendelssohn's monograph, published by Copperfield Publishing in 1979, was the first comprehensive scholarly account of Long's life and work and remains the standard reference on the subject. Copperfield Publishing, the Sydney-based fine art press, produced the book in two formats: a trade edition and the signed limited deluxe edition offered here, bound in full crushed Morocco and limited to 275 copies. The reproduction quality throughout is excellent; the plates — glossy, vivid, and printed with the care the subject demands — do full justice to Long's colour and line.

Near fine. Bindings in near-perfect condition with a couple of very minor markings to spine and light rubbing at corners. A few small spots to fore-edge. Contents otherwise as new. Plates fine throughout.

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This book is currently on display in the rare book section of our Paddington store. If you would like more information or to arrange a viewing, please contact: rarebooks@harryhartog.com.au

Catalogue Number: HH000277