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

A$280 · Offered by Harry Hartog Rare Books · No longer available

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 b

• Binding: Hardcover

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