Daryl LINDSAY

Australian 1889–1976

Daryl Lindsay, a member of the famous Lindsay family, is best known for his directorship of the National Gallery of Victoria from 1941 to 1956. During those years he formed a powerful partnership with the president of the council of trustees, Keith Murdoch, and led the Gallery into the twentieth century.

As a young man Lindsay had worked as a jackeroo and overseer on country properties in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria. During World War I he enlisted in the AIF and served in France until transferred to artistic duties in a hospital in Kent. In 1918 his superiors gave him time off to study at the Slade School under Henry Tonks, which was a turning point in his life. On another visit to England, this time with his wife Joan, he lived in London where they familiarised themselves with the great collections and put together an impressive network of art-world contacts. Back in Australia he earned a living as an illustrator and fine artist.

For an artist with such a forthright, forceful personality, Daryl Lindsay’s art (ballet dancers, still lifes, horse portraits, landscapes), often surprises us with its gentility. In Landscape, Myrniong, c. 1930, we see the classical modernism of the between-the-wars period and think of artists such as Elioth Gruner and Douglas Dundas. There is even a soupçon of surrealism in the ‘little round pink clouds [that] would hang hour after hour above the same fold in the hills as if they were already painted on the backcloth of pale luminous sky.’1

Myrniong is a township in the Pentland Hills, west of Melbourne. The Lindsays discovered it when they were living at Bacchus Marsh during the Depression. Lindsay showed a number of Myrniong subjects, including this work, in his 1931 exhibition at the Fine Art Society’s Gallery, Melbourne.

1 J. Lindsay, Time without Clocks, Melbourne, 1962, p. 124.

Terence Lane