
A visit to Springwood
Norman Lindsay is a very Australian treasure.
Although his works were exhibited in the UK and in America, his biggest flash of international exposure to date was posthumous, as a result of a 1994 Hollywood film, Sirens, starring Sam Neil, Hugh Grant and Tara Fitzgerald. The film told the story of a somewhat uptight cleric and his wife briefly staying at the idyllic home of a scandalous bohemian artist, who was modelled on Lindsay. Although the script takes a lot of artistic liberties (it’s doubtful Lindsay would have let a ‘wowser’ onto his property, for example) the film was shot at Springwood, Lyndsay’s idyllic retreat in the Blue Mountains, where he lived most his life. The retreat is now open to the public and contains a Museum dedicated to his memory, and last week I paid it a visit.
Although Sam Neil is agreeably enigmatic in the film, Lindsay, as a man, was even more interesting. He was prodigiously talented and lived an enviably long and passionate life. His creative energy was insatiable - if his output is anything to go by, he seemed to be creating from the moment he got up in the morning to the moment his head hit the pillow, and he excelled at everything he turned his hand to, be it pen and ink cartoons, etching, oil and watercolour painting, sculpture, model ship building, novel writing, furniture making…
His skill with the etcher’s burin was particularly noteworthy. He mastered etching, dry point and aquatint and produced some outstanding works, particularly in the 1920s and 1930s. His linework shows he worked with confidence at great speed in unconventional ways; he preferred to build up form and shade in dense clusters of parallel lines, eschewing conventional cross-hatching, and often worked with maddening delicacy and restraint, using a specialised burin to cut the lightest of lines and then thin wax washes to further restrict the bite of the acid so the line was even finer. As a result he was able to build up such contrasts of light and dark the paper itself seemed to shine.
Enter the Magicians
Enter The Magicians, a print from 1927, is possibly the most outstanding example of this work. Lindsay himself wrote a very Blakean description of what the picture is about:
‘The Magicians, of course, are the artists, the creators, whose function is to create human consciousness by revealing life in all its complexities of human passion to mankind.’

This is a complex composition, with over 30 characters packed into a space roughly 30 cm by 35 cm in size. At the bottom centre is an incandescent flash of light, within which is the faintest outline of a shocked face of a seated female, and this provides the light that picks out the rest of the figures within the frame. Three figures dominate: on the right of the light is a powerfully-built female nude with a wild shock of curly hair and an enraptured look on her face, on the left is another, but she is wearing a full length veil and gazing straight out at us in a knowing and highly seductive manner, while in the centre is a man sporting a pentacle headdress, a long beard and a severe expression on his face - and who has, it must be said, an uncanny resemblance to Vincent Price. Behind them in the background are two more magnificent semi-nudes, a reclining woman and a man cradling a sword behind his neck; their musculature and shading suggests they are both as likely made of mountains and forests as flesh.
It's a stunning picture. The original copper plate that Lindsay worked on was preserved and is on the display in his old print studio on the property, and is almost unbearable to look at, so intricate and savant is the burin work. It is the work of a technical virtuoso of the highest rank.
18 of the 30 figures in the composition are nude and in variously sultry, coquettish or heroic poses, and it is this, the nudity and acres of gorgeous flesh – mostly female – that Lindsay is famous for. In fact you could say he is too well known for it; naked women feature so prominently and regularly in his work that some commentators have dismissed Lindsay as a one-trick pony, and an obsessive and somewhat smutty one at that.
The Victorian Art World
The Victorian Art World that Lindsay grew up with is interesting in that one of it's seminal moments was the formation of the Pre Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB - yes they used this acronym) in 1848. This was a somewhat pious collection of young Art Turks who abhorred the slick loose brushstrokes of Sir 'Sloshua' Reynolds and preferred their paintings to be classically composed and painted with meticulous attention to detail. The detail was important, because the paintings had to have symbolic narratives, either based on the Bible or literary classics, that told morally uplifting stories. The style proved popular, but within a decade or two it had become a bit of an excuse for men to paint beautiful young women in a state of undress - which has always been a popular theme in the Art world, providing, of course, it was done for educational purposes. Lindsay himself cited one such picture as having a formative impact on him as a young man; Solomon J. Soloman’s Ajax and Cassandra, still held in the Ballarat museum where he originally saw it. Ajax has effortlessly flung Cassandra, a young red-haired woman with petal-white skin, over his shoulder and is taking her away to rape her.

Naked obsession(s)
You can see why it made an impression. Throughout his life Lindsay showed an absolute delight and obsession with capturing and recapturing the glories of the female form, and this delight resonates with an almost audible hum from all of his work. Even in modern godless times such as these, where the female body is relentlessly commodified, Lindsay’s obsession is so overt it can feel uncomfortable: the room displaying his oil paintings, whose frames barely restrain dozens of nudes from cavorting and tumbling out of them onto the tiles, seems a little cloying and dated, a little too close to chocolate-box soft-porn fantasy for my sensibilities - to the extent I started questioning my parenting skills as soon as I walked in there with my teenage kids.

This is partly because, for us, who are accustomed to being regularly accosted by underwear models on billboard advertising - and who also can easily access hardcore porn, most of it horribly predatory, online - Lindsay is pushing at a door that is not so much shut but was taken off its hinges decades ago. We can guess that Lindsay is just being mischievous here, dispensing with the instructive fig leaves of Victorian painting for something more direct, and saying: 'Come on! Don't be shy, you're really looking for THIS aren't you...'
It’s a message that has been entirely corrupted by the depths plumbed by the modern online porn industry, and the result is that, today, Lindsay’s paintings can look like a Boys Own manual for hormonal teens - all heroes and hareems - yet still a place where women are objectified and valued only for their curves and the shine of their skin.
However, I don't feel it at all fair to dismiss Lindsay in this way. Nearly all of the women he drew - and it feels like there is an infinite number of them - have a sense of joy and humour, an ‘agency’ to them, that is very unlike the serene objectified blankness of the women in late Victorian painting. And I think it’s this that makes Lindsay still such an erotic and unashamedly sexy painter. There is always at least one nude in each of his pictures who you could imagine getting up, putting on her clothes and coming down the pub with you for an entertaining drink and a gossip – and sometimes there are whole armies of them.
So the question is: was this twist of observational realism just a conscious artistic choice?
Rose everywoman
Well, not quite. He was lucky enough - or had the good sense - to surround himself with some remarkably smart, strong women who not only happened to be stunningly beautiful, but clearly had quite wicked senses of humour. His second wife, Rose Soady, who he met when she modelled for him, appears to have been a powerhouse of good sense, as well as a ravishing beauty. Rose was the one who took care of business – she ran Springwood (the deeds were even in her name) with a hard-nosed practicality, and there was a great story on the Springwood tour about her hiding his oil paintings in a false partition at the back of a wardrobe to prevent him giving them away on a whim to friends. It was her business sense and hard work that brought in the money and freed him up to spend every minute of every working day being creative.
Lindsay sketched, photographed and painted her continually, and obviously adored her; and it is a little difficult not to fall slightly in love with her the more you read and see of her within his work. For example there are several nude statues of her placed around the garden, and one of these shows her fleeing a faun that is trying to grope her buttocks.

This is candid to the point of being crass, but the fact the Lindsays were comfortable installing something like this in their garden speaks for itself. This is more Carry On than Ajax and Cassandra; there’s no threatening carnality in this sculpture - just comedy and an innocence in the absurdity of it all. If the activity depicted doesn’t look entirely consensual, it does at least look playful and, well, silly.
And this gets close to the paradox of Lindsay’s work. Yes, he is obsessed with breasts and buttocks and their curves, and some of his most famous pictures show fauns manhandling and groping nymphs, but there’s something about the faces of other characters in the pictures that suggests they are less worried for the women than the fate of the misbehaving satyrs. You could put that down to 'the male gaze' looking out for its own, but then you also have to return, once again, to Rose, the model on whom the majority of the nudes are based. Because the more you know of her, the more you suspect anyone objectifying and treating women badly under her watch was going to deeply regret it.

Blakean: What did Lindsay think of Blake?
So, Norman Lindsay was a technical virtuoso, endlessly creative and a lover of women. What did he think of William Blake?
You can get an idea of just how important Blake was to the Lindsay household by the fact Jack Lindsay, Norman Lindsay’s eldest son (and a professional author), went so far as to write a book about Blake in 1927, "William Blake; Creative Will and the Poetic Image". It's worth noting that the son writes about Blake as a proto-socialist and is rather dismissive of his spirituality but this is but one piece of some pretty conclusive jigsaw: Norman Lindsay was quite the Blakean.
William Blake may have been ignored in his day, but his lionisation properly began in the mid Victorian period. Blake was a big influence on the PRB, as he shared (or perhaps prophesised) their hatred for Sir Joshua Reynolds ( Blake famously annotated his copy of Reynold's treatise on painting with 'this man was hired to depress art' ). Dante and William Rosetti, who were PRB members, were instrumental in publishing his poems in an accessible format, while Alexander Gilchrist published Blake’s first biography ‘Life of Blake’ in 1863. By the turn of the century W B Yeats had taken up the cause (co-authoring "The Works of William Blake: Poetic, Symbolic, and Critical" in 1893) , while C J Jung was championing his philosophy in his seminal 1912 publication titled "Psychology of the Unconscious".
Simply put, Blake was on the fashionable cutting edge throughout Lindsay’s formative years, and you can see visual echoes of the Englishman's influence throughout the Australian's work.


Philosophically their world views were very similar.

First of all, they both believed in the Power of Imaginative Vision. Lindsay, like Blake, believed in the supremacy of the imagination- and art was a primary medium for transcending the mundane and exploring deeper spiritual truths – something clearly evident in his description of Enter the Magicians quoted above.
Secondly, the work of both men is Highly Eroticised. Both Blake and Lindsay used nudity as both an expression of spiritual enlightenment and a celebration of the human body and its sexuality. There are apocryphal tales of both men enjoying nudity in the privacy of their own homes.

However, while Blake’s nudes are idealised and otherworldly, Lindsay delights in more earthy depictions.
The two men also despised and set themselves Against Orthodoxy: Blake used his art to wage his own proudly heretical one-man war against the religious and political orthodoxies of his time, while Lindsay similarly baited the conservative norms of early 20th-century Australian society with his mischievous and scandalous eroticism.
They also both Believed in Mysticism and Spirituality: Lindsay, like Blake, had a deep interest in the mystical and esoteric, and many of his prints and pictures depict mythological and occult scenes. Blake's visionary experiences and spiritual themes likely inspired Lindsay to delve into similar explorations in his own work – again Enter the Magicians is a good example of this.
And the men shared another happy circumstance, in that they were both Lucky Enough to Marry Supportive Wives. While Lindsay had Rose, Blake was also fortunate to have a woman at his side who believed in him enough to dedicate herself to enabling his work. Catherine, Blake’s wife, ran the household and made herself an essential part of the print making process, much as Rose did.
As Gilchrist put it:
“The poet and his wife did everything in making the book – writing, designing, printing, engraving – everything except manufacturing the paper: the very ink, or colour rather, they did make.”
The Lindsays divided the work up slightly differently. As Norman put it: "The etching's are entirely my wife's affair. she prints them, arranges the editions, keeps count of the sales, destroys all discarded prints and proofs... Once I've finished a plate I'm done with it."

In terms of Lifestyles, however, one of them got a distinctly better deal than the other.
Lindsay was a child prodigy, and this meant that, at a relatively early age, he managed to secure himself a regular income producing cartoons for the popular satirical magazine The Bulletin, which continued to commission him for the rest of his life. This gave him a solid enough financial footing to both indulge all his creative drives and invest in property.
Springwood is set in still idyllic settings near the Blue Mountains, and the Lindsays could afford to build multiple studios, guest rooms and a swimming pond to their own designs, and invite friends, artists and art-world cognoscenti to come over to share his little slice of paradise with them.
Blake had a day job as an engraver too, but, although he was known in many artistic circles and salons, he was probably a little too odd and a bit too much of a working man to be a comfortable fit for the more lucrative Georgian intelligentsia in London. Although he was venerated in the later years of his life by a small band of artists, self-styled as ‘The Ancients’, who were devoted to him, by then his personal circumstances were very different from Lindsay’s. As Henry Crabb Robinson reminisced to Gilchrist:

"He was at work engraving in a small bedroom, light, and looking out on a mean yard—Everything in the room squalid and indicating poverty except himself And there was a natural gentility about and an insensibility to the seeming poverty which quite removed the impression—Besides, his linen was clean, his hand white and his air quite unembarrassed when he begged me to sit down, as if he were in a palace."
Despite this ‘seeming poverty’ he and Catherine continued to produce their illuminated manuscripts, with their living quarters doubling as a workshop - there are other descriptions of William the two preparing the copper plates with acid in the same room as they ate. No matter where he was, Blake was still living in the higher realm of his Imagination, with Catherine by his side to help him get it all onto the page.
Blakean: what would Blake have thought of Norman Lindsay?
In a world outside of space and time, how would they have met?
Blake was a major role model for Lindsay, so it’s pretty obvious that the Australian - and most likely Rose too - would have loved to have had the chance of entertaining William and Catherine Blake at Springwood. And I think it's not hard to imagine the two couples getting on famously and finding themselves in Beulah - Blake's mythological location for the experience of Paradise - together. I also don’t doubt the stay would have been caught both on Lindsay's camera and within the works of both men.
In the Everywhen of my imagination, I like to think of them all laughing and conversing together on a hot summer’s day. The comedy togas are lying crumpled on the lawn, all the talk of art and spirituality had been done, and they are all quite naked, drinking home-made lemonade and cooling off in the swimming pond. And amongst the symphony of the cicadas, and with the crimson rosellas flashing by, William, who wrote his poetry to be sung and had a fine voice, would be singing The Laughing Song from his Songs of Innocence, to the rapt, thrilled attention of his hosts, the Lindsays :
When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy
And the dimpling stream runs laughing by
When the air does laugh with our merry wit
And the green hills laugh with the noise of it
When the meadows laugh with the lively green
And the grasshopper laughs in the merry scene
When Rose and Cate and the Lindsay’s
With their sweet round mouths sing Ha Ha He
When the painted birds laugh in the shade
Where our table with cherries and nuts is spread
Come live and be merry and join with me
To live the sweet chorus of Ha Ha He

Postscript and bibliography
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Blake and Lindsay’s different approaches to the technicalities of printing is a fascinating subject and would have been the cause of lively debate between them.
Blake preferred strong intaglio lines to aquatint - something, incidentally, that makes his illustrations so suitable for tattooing – while Lindsay, again as illustrated in Enter The Magicians, was an Aquatint master capable of almost photographic verisimilitude. Blake, characteristically, saw this as a spiritual choice, seeing line as a boundary of energy and therefore an almost holy thing when compared to the 'blotting and blurring' of the new fangled mezzotint techniques (which he had had to master for his day job). And to this end Blake, ever the innovator, devised his own unique method of Illuminated Printing printing.
This article is not the place for describing Illuminated printing. For a brilliant short piece on the subject please visit William Blake Prints, which touches on the superb work by Michael Phillips. For a description of the Lindsay's work (Norman and Rose) I recommend the guided tour at Springwood. There are good books containing Lindsay’s superb etchings, but surprisingly no cheap collections of Lindsay’s work in print. It seems the family, like Rose, are still prudent at carefully controlling his legacy – for which they can’t be blamed.
The Legendary Lindsays, a book by Ursula Prunster, (with contributions from Helen Glad and Robert Holden) was also used as a reference in this essay, and is a recommended buy from the Springwood Museum gift shop.
A good description of the different print technologies can be found here.
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