Norman Lindsay Facsimile Etching - Atlantis

 

$605 + Postage

 

For years Norman 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.

Norman 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etched Atlantis in 1925 and although it is mentioned in Rose’s record book, apparently the plate failed and it remained unpublished.

The copies we currently have for sale are all new, still in their protective wrap and include the original Certificate of Authenticity.