The Isle of San

A$18,500 · Offered by Douglas Stewart Fine Books

Limited edition

A phantasy by Leon Gellert with five original etchings by Norman Lindsay. Sydney : Art in Australia, 1919. Folio, quarter vellum over green cloth, pp 139, with initials printed in red, frontispiece portrait after an etching by Lindsay, five original large etchings with lettered tissue-guards by Norman Lindsay, each etching signed in full in pencil; occasional very mild scattered foxing, a fine copy. Limited to 120 copies of which 100 were for sale, copy number 21, signed by Leon Gellert. The Isle of San is dedicated by Gellert to Sydney Ure Smith and Bertram Stevens, and was the first deluxe edition book printed by Art in Australia . The Isle of San was sold out in a single afternoon because Norman’s etchings were enjoying a boom. (Leon Gellert to John Hetherington, 6th January 1972. Hetherington papers, La Trobe MSS 9740/15). Norman Lindsay had first collaborated with the young Adelaide-born war poet Leon Gellert in 1917, with sixteen of his pen illustrations accompanying Gellert s text in the successful Angus Robertson edition of Gellert s Songs of a Campaign . After his discharge from active service Gellert was quickly accepted into the Lindsays intimate inner circle of artist and writer friends. The idea for Gellert s fantasy The Isle of San had apparently come to him in his dreams. With its poetic landscape saturated with the themes of Beauty and the physicality of Love, it replaced the nightmare of the horrors of war which would have haunted Gellert since his experience

• Binding: Hardcover

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