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Overview
The dream merchant, a 1920 etching, is a fantasy scene typical of Lindsay’s body of work. It depicts five nude and semi-nude female figures gathered around a hideous dwarfed figure who holds a small open treasure box. The clothes the female figures are wearing are ambiguously historical and reminiscent of opera costumes. Or not wearing, which is rather the point. Three of the four figures bare their breasts and the fourth figure is completely nude. The dwarf figure, possibly the dream merchant of the print’s title, wears a turban and scowls.
The exaggerated expressions and theatrical costumes of the figures of The dream merchant border on caricature. This is not really surprising as Lindsay spent fifty years working as a cartoonist for the Australian newspaper the Bulletin. The exaggerated and other-worldly aesthetic is also seen in the strong contrast of light and shade use in the etching, which resembles the lighting of early 20th century cinema, while an art historical ancestor is surely the Romantic painter Henry Fuseli.
Lindsay had been raised on a diet of fantasy literature during a childhood when he had been forbidden to play outside due to a blood disorder. This comes through in the surrealistic style of his adult art and his fantastical subject matter. Ambiguously historical theatrical costumes were the stock-in-trade of Lindsay’s prints throughout his career; in the 1890s he had fallen out with his friend Jack Castieau when the latter criticised his pictures of pirates as the subject had become "something of a craze for … Norman." Not only was the term ‘craze’ far stronger – and more negative – than it is today, but it surely offended Lindsay’s ‘high art’ aspirations.
Sources:
Blunden, Godfrey Norman Lindsay – Watercolours (Sydney and London: Ure Smith, 1969)
http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/lindsay-norman-alfred-7757
Dr Mark Stocker Curator, Historical International Art August 2018