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Atlantis
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Title |
Atlantis |
| Size |
31.7 x 25.2 cm |
| Date Published |
2006 |
| Reference |
Norman Lindsay Etchings: Catalogue Raisonné (Odana
Editions and Josef Lebovic Gallery, 1999, cat.138) |
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The original etching was never published. For
years Norman Lindsay had been intrigued by the legendary sunken
city of Atlantis. Of all the vanished civilisations it is arguably
the
most contentious; scholars from antiquity to the present have debated
its existence. Plato wrote two treatises about the lost island
and in one, Critias, he positioned it to the west of the Pillars
of Hercules (Gibraltar) on the Atlantic coast near Cadiz. Latter-day
German scholars as meticulous as Richard Henning and Adolf Schulten
have insisted that Plato’s description of Atlantis is based
on concrete facts. Lindsay even introduced his daughters
Jane and Honey to the legend. In 1928 Rose added an amusing anecdote
in a letter to Andrew Watt:
Norman is this minute giving the kids their lessons … he is
giving them from the time of Atlantis. I get much fun from hearing
them telling the cook and the nurse all about how it was sunk and
so forth. The cook said ‘I’ve never heard of the place’.
Norman wrote a ‘thesis’ on Atlantis which he published
in The Scribblings of an Idle Mind. In a postscript he mentioned
an exchange of letters with Leonard Cottrell, amateur archaeologist
and eminent author of books on ancient civilisations. Cottrell said
that archaeologists had never discovered any factual evidence of
the existence of Atlantis and, therefore, he had no belief in the
myth. Norman etched Atlantis in 1925 and although it is mentioned
in Rose’s record book, apparently the plate failed and it remained
unpublished. |
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