Alternately admired, denounced, and ignored, Norman Lindsay is a divisive and unsettled figure in Australian cultural history. From the early twentieth century until the 1970s he was among its best-known artists and popular writers, and an assiduous cultivator of his own myth. He was a prominent newspaper cartoonist and book illustrator, but invested most of his abundant creative energy in pen drawings, water colours, etchings, oil paintings, and sculptures. His art continues to command high prices at art auctions, but most art critics and academics today agree with the splenetic assessment of Robert Hughes, who dismissed him as a “furiously energetic, charismatic, and mediocre old polymath” whose “bizarre rococo nudes (were) somewhere between Aubrey Beardsley and Antoine Watteau, without the pictorial merits of either” (19). Today Lindsay’s work is rarely found on the walls of...
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Citation: Gillen, Paul. "Norman Lindsay". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 18 January 2026 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=2743, accessed 09 June 2026.]
