Norman Alfred William Lindsay

Norman Alfred William Lindsay (22 February 1879 – 21 November 1969) was a renowned Australian artist and writer.

Lindsay was born in Creswick, Victoria. He was a prolific artist, sculptor, writer, editorial cartoonist and scale modeler, as well as being a highly talented boxer.

Norman was the son of Irish surgeon Robert Charles William Alexander Lindsay and Jane Elizabeth Lindsay from Creswick. Fifth of ten children, he was the brother of Percy Lindsay (1870–1952), Lionel Lindsay (1874–1961), Ruby Lindsay (1885–1919), and Daryl Lindsay (1889–1976).

Personal life

He married Catherine (Kate) Agatha Parkinson, in Melbourne on 23 May 1900. Their son Jack was born, in Melbourne, on 20 October 1900, followed by Raymond in 1903 and Phillip in 1906. They divorced in 1918. Phillip died in 1958 and Raymond in 1960. In the Lindsay tradition, Jack would be prolific as a publisher, writer, translator and activist.
Naked lady statue in the Norman Lindsay gardens

Rose

Rose Soady began modelling for Norman in 1902. She would become his second wife, his most recognizable model, his business manager, and the printer for most of his etchings. By the time he left for London in 1909, Rose had supplanted his wife and joined him there in 1910.[1]

He married Rose Soady on 14 January 1920. Their children, Janet and Helen (Honey) were born in 1920 and 1922 respectively. Honey would remain in the U.S. after visiting with her mother to cache her father's works at the beginning of World War II and Jane would acquire the printmaking studio on the Faulconbridge property in 1949 and build a house around it.

Works

He is widely regarded as one of Australia's greatest artists, producing a vast body of work in different media, including pen drawing, etching, watercolour, oil and sculptures in concrete and bronze.

A large body of his work is housed in his former home at Faulconbridge, New South Wales, now the Norman Lindsay Gallery and Museum, and many works reside in private and corporate collections. His art continues to climb in value today. In 2002, a record price was attained by his oil painting, Spring's Innocence, which sold to the National Gallery of Victoria for $AU333,900.

Loss

His frank and sumptuous nudes were highly controversial. In 1940, Rose took 16 crates of paintings, drawings and etchings to the U.S. to protect them from the nascent war. Unfortunately they were discovered when the train they travelled in caught fire, they were then impounded and burned as pornography by American officials. His older brother Lionel remembers Norman's reaction was, "'Don't worry, I'll do more.' And he did."[1]

Output

Lindsay's creative output was vast, his energy enormous. Several eyewitness accounts tell of his working practices in the 1920s. He would wake early and produce a watercolour before breakfast, then by mid-morning he would be in his etching studio where he would work until late afternoon. He would work on a concrete sculpture in the garden during the afternoon and in the evening write a new chapter for whatever novel he was working on at the time.

As a break, he would work on a model ship some days. He was highly inventive, melting down the lead casings of oil paint tubes to use for the figures on his model ships, made a large easel using a door, carved and decorated furniture, designed and built chairs, created garden planters, roman columns and built his own additions to the Faulconbridge property.

Career
Norman Lindsay, The trumpet calls (Sydney: W.A. Gullick Govt. Printer, c.1918); col. lithograph; 91 x 67.2 cm. National Library of Australia. Lindsay produced a number of propaganda and recruiting posters and cartoons for the Australian Government during World War I.
Cartoons such as this one, by Lindsay, were used both for recruitment and to promote conscription during World War I.

In 1895, Lindsay moved to Melbourne to work on a local magazine with his older brother Lionel. His Melbourne experiences are described in Rooms and Houses.

In 1901, he and Lionel joined the staff of the Sydney Bulletin, a weekly newspaper, magazine and review. His association there would last fifty years.

Lindsay wrote the children's classic The Magic Pudding published in 1918 and created a scandal when his novel Redheap (supposedly based on his hometown, Creswick) was banned due to censorship laws. Many of his novels have a frankness and vitality that matches his art.

Lindsay also worked as an editorial cartoonist, notable for often illustrating the racist and right-wing political leanings that dominated The Bulletin at that time; the "Red Menace" and "Yellow Peril" were popular themes in his cartoons. These attitudes occasionally spilled over into his other work, and modern editions of The Magic Pudding often omit one couplet in which "you unmitigated Jew" is used as an insult.

Lindsay was associated with a number of poets, such as Kenneth Slessor, Francis Webb and Hugh McCrae, influencing them in part through a philosophical system outlined in his book Creative Effort. He also illustrated the cover for the seminal Henry Lawson book, While the Billy Boils. Lindsay's son, Jack Lindsay, emigrated to England, where he set up Fanfrolico Press, which issued works illustrated by Lindsay.

Lindsay influenced more than a few artists, notably the illustrators Roy Krenkel and Frank Frazetta; he was also good friends with Ernest Moffitt.

Europe

Norman travelled to Europe in 1909, Rose followed later. In Naples he began 100 pen-and-ink illustrations for Petronius' Satyricon. Visits to the then South Kensington Museum where he made sketches of model ships in the Museum's collection stimulated a lifelong interest in ship models. The Lindsays returned to Australia in 1911.

Screen versions of Lindsay's work

Film
The first major screen adaptation of Lindsay's literary works was the (1969) Anglo-Australian co-production Age of Consent; adapted from Lindsay's 1935 novel, it was the last feature film directed by Michael Powell. In (1994) Sam Neill played a fictionalised version of Lindsay in John Duigan's Sirens, set and filmed primarily at Lindsay's Faulconbridge home. The film is also notable as the movie debut of Australian supermodel Elle MacPherson.

Television
In 1972 five novels were adapted for TV as part of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Norman Lindsay festival. These were Halfway to Nowhere (adapted by Cliff Green), "Redheap" (adapted by Eleanor Witcombe), A Curate in Bohemia (adapted by Michael Broody), The Cousin from Fiji (adapted by Barbara Vernon) and Dust or Polish (adapted by Peter Kenna).[2].

Searches of the ABC's TARA Online television database and the collection database of the National Film & Sound Archive (conducted 4 Mar. 2009) failed to return any results for these programs. Regrettably, many videotaped ABC programs, series (e.g. Certain Women) and program segments from the late 1960s and early 1970s were subsequently erased as part of an ill-considered economy drive. Although the recent closure of ABC Sydney's Gore Hill studios uncovered considerable quantities of film and video footage long thought to have been lost (e.g. the complete The Aunty Jack Show), the absence of any reference on the TARA or NFSA databases and the paucity of citations elsewhere (e.g. IMdb) suggest that the master recordings of these programs may no longer exist. Unfortunately, the first broadcasts of these programs also predated the advent of affordable domestic videocassette recorders in Australia (which did not come into widespread household use until the late 1970s) so it fairly unlikely that any domestically recorded off-air copies exist.

Bibliography

Novels

* A Curate in Bohemia 1913
* Redheap 1930 (published in the U.S. as Every Mother's Son)
* Miracles by Arrangement 1932 (published in the U.S. as Mr. Gresham and Olympus)
* Saturdee 1933
* Pan in the Parlour 1933
* The Cautious Amorist 1934 (first published in the U.S. in 1932)
* Age of Consent 1935
* The Cousin from Fiji 1945
* Halfway to Anywhere 1947
* Dust or Polish? 1950

Children's books

* The Magic Pudding 1918
* The Flyaway Highway 1936

Poetry book

* illustrations in Francis Webb A Drum for Ben Boyd Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1948

Other

* Norman Lindsay: Pencil Drawings 1969, Angus & Robertson, Sydney
* Creative Effort: an essay in affirmation 1924
* The scribblings of an idle mind 1956
* Norman Lindsay's pen drawings 1974

Autobiographical

* Bohemians of the Bulletin 1965
* Rooms and Houses 1968
* My Mask (autobiography) 1970