Press Articles on and References to Norman Lloyd Australian Financial Review, 3 April 2008: Sydney artist recasts his impression "...One long-dead artist receiving attention today is Norman Lloyd .... A lot of investigation is taking place to establish Lloyd's character and identity, and the artist now has his own website - normanlloyd.com.au. The Manly art team Banziger Hulme is behind the website. .... A large collector has been buying Lloyd's work through Banziger Hulme .... More than 335 works by this prolific artist have been sold over the past 20 years." Jean Campbell: Early Sydney Moderns. John Young and the Macquarie Galleries 1916 - 1946. Craftsman House, 1988 "...  A fresh exhibition every fortnight was the policy of the Macquarie Galleries and the first years - demonstrating the real need in Sydney at that time for a reputable, high quality commercial gallery - saw a continuous series of shows by top-ranking artists. There were Streeton, Blamire Young, Harold Herbert, Tom Roberts, Joan and Daryl Lindsay from Victoria; Heysen and MacNally from Adelaide; Roy de Maistre, Norman Lloyd, Sydney Thompson, Bertram MacKennall back from Europe. " P. 105: "On the advice of Norman Lloyd, an Australian artist who had spent many years abroad painting and teaching, some days were spent in the incredible little hill town of San Gimignano. Australian Financial Review, 15 December 1988: Norman Lloyd's Work Enjoy Late Harvest By Terry Ingram Judging by a recent metamorphosis during which a painting catalogued as a Norman Lloyd was considered to be a Penleigh Boyd, Penleigh Boyds are worth $25,000 and Norman Lloyds $1,200. A painting in the sale held by James R. Lawson Pty Ltd in Sydney recently, however, suggests that the valuations should be reversed. Instead of looking at a Norman Lloyd signature and wishing it were Penleigh Boyd's, gallery and auction goers might consider whether Norman Lloyd's signature, at times, might be more desirable. Norman Lloyd's Tuscany Harvest sold at the auction for $8,500 which was well above anything normally associated with the artist. The painting, however, was a very special Norman Lloyd: a late-period work. Again, this is as topsy-turvy situation as most artists' earlier works usually attract a premium, not their middle or later periods. He also contradicts the familiar story of the Australian artist going overseas to see his work go downhill. The chance of mistaking a later-period Lloyd for a Penleigh Boyd of any period is so remote that such reverse serendipity is hopelessly unlikely. The Norman Lloyd who painted Tuscany might more easily be mistaken for a Derwent Lees or other members of the Modern British school such as the painter of The Icknield Way in the Art Gallery of NSW, Spencer Gore, except that the Modern Brits tended to use thicker paint. Unforgivably, Norman Lloyd had changed his style violently and Australian collectors seldom forgive artists for doing so. Moreover, a great burst of creativity in the late 1920s was not followed through and his later work became rather florid. He also turned his back on traditionalism when Australia was not ready for modernism. However, the critic for the Melbourne Argus (Arthur Streeton?) appears to have found the exhibition at which his breakaway work was shown - the Fine Art Society's Gallery at 100 Exhibition Street - from June 18 to July 2, 1929, both exciting and stimulating. "Interesting modern work is that of Mr Norman Lloyd, a Sydney artist who has been in Europe for three years," the critic wrote. "Mr Lloyd has found, chiefly in Italy and France, subjects for treatment by a method which applies a certain formalism to reality, and seeks out possibilities for making a picture. The work is not decoration as generally understood, but often there is a good deal about it that is decorative. "In a number of cases there is a tendency towards emphasising the cube rather than the curve, and the result is worth much attention in such examples as Boccaccio's Country. Towers and turrets and hills appeal greatly to the artist and he suits his method ably by representing them. Bridges and boats and archways are treated in other pictures." Boccaccio's Country must have been some picture. Number 7 in a catalogue of 36 works, it was priced at 100 guineas and was the most expensive non-Australian work. Tuscany - the same painting which sold at Lawson's - was priced at only 20 guineas. However, the artist and his dealer may have priced the works according to their likely acceptance by the market for the same exhibition included works of Australian landscapes at up to 150 guineas. Of these the reviewer said: "A link with Australian Tradition and with the demand for 'atmosphere' is more observable in these than in the others, though they have individuality." There was obviously still a touch of the boring Streeton landscape school which had influenced Penleigh Boyd and accounts for the difficulty some in the trade have in distinguishing the work of Boyd and Norman Lloyd. A month before the FAS exhibition in Melbourne, he had a show at Sydney's Macquarie Galleries and the change in style equally noted then by The Sydney Morning Herald's critic: "The oil paintings which the young Australian artist exhibited at the Macquarie Galleries about three years ago were very conventional. They revealed no imagination, and were merely attractive colour arrangements transcribed from nature. The exhibition he is opening today stands on a different plane altogether. It is the work of a man who has studied the methods of the various schools, not superficially, but earnestly and practically so as to assimilate these methods into his own style." The writer selected several paintings for comment, including Boccaccio's Country, but found Annunciation (a subject that would not be so desirable today) particularly striking. A more sophisticated market nowadays is learing away, even at auction, from the traditionals and it seems likely that second-generation Streetons will not command the respect they did when fresher, more original work by their non-gum tree contemporaries come up. It may not then matter so much whether a painting is a Penleigh Boyd Streeton or a Norman Lloyd Streeton. The distinction, however, was very evident early this year when a Sydney Harbour scene sold as a Norman Lloyd for a small sum of money ($1,200) surfaced in Australia as a Penleigh Boyd for a big sum of money ($25,000). Later, it reappeared at a Sydney auction as"Australian school" and sold for a middling amount ($5,500). Lloyd had an exhibition of 55 Sydney Harbour views at the rooms of the Society of Women Painters in August 1920, but the harbour was doubtless a subject that Melbourne's Penleigh Boyd also painted. At Polygan Wood on the Western Front during World War I a fragment of shell tore through both of Norman Lloyd's thighs. With some luck and skilful surgery Lloyd was rehabilitated. Julian Ashton wrote in the catalogue of the 1920 exhibition: "He took up his paint brush again and I suggested that he should try to capture some of those marvelous atmospheric effects so frequent in our beautiful harbour." Lloyd was not so lucky in later life. An odd and unsourced story had him walking the streets of Paris naked (threadbare?). After his death a large number of his academic works were offered around in Britain, presumably from the estate, and may yet have to hit the market. Yet he was remembered by a letter writer to The Sydney Morning Herald in March 1980 as a "forgotten artist". The Times of London also gave him an obituary in March 1983, albeit only five lines. Penleigh Boyd might well have approved of Norman Lloyd's new Modern British directions, had Boyd not died young in a car crash, for Boyd brought out an exhibition of Modern British art to Melbourne in 1929. This was still quite tame by international standards, C.R.W. Nevinson's Looking Down on Downtown New York exciting the most comment because of the angle it took and the National Gallery of Victoria buying The Hop Pickers by Sir Alfred Munnings. There was a touch of Mexican primitive art, almost, in Tuscany Harvest, and no doubt the treatment of the subject will be compared and contrasted with that of Lloyd Rees who was also inspired by the region. Fiesole, The St Gotthard Massif, Landscape in Tuscany and Pont St Cloud, Paris, were other titles in the FAS exhibition which appears to have been basically the same as the Macquarie Galleries show. In 1946, Norman Lloyd was in Paris chasing Matisse (a diverting story was told in The Sydney Morning Herald of Lloyd's pursuit of Matisse and meeting a paid Matisse stand-in). Two of the Lloyds sold at Lawson's went to Edward Barkes with competitive bidding from Chris Day. They may very well end up at the Bridget MacDonnell Gallery in Melbourne which coincidentally opened a new exhibition with a Paris connection this week. Among the exhibits is The Cello Player ($12,000) which was in Michael Kmit's exhibition in Melbourne in 1964, the first he had held in Australia after seven years in the US. Reviewing the exhibition, Alan McCulloch said in The Herald: "Many of the paintings belong to the school of Paris before the First World War, the pale austerely painted faces belong to the streets and cafes of Mount Parnasse." Australian Financial Review, 25 July 1986: How Lloyd became Boyd By Terry Ingram Lloyd is normally a name most frequently associated with deft money management (Lloyds Bank and Lloyds Insurance). A recent art deal suggest that this is still so. A Melbourne art dealer was able to transform a £600 Norman Lloyd into a $25,000 Penleigh Boyd within a few weeks. "Surely you are not going to write about that?" said Melbourne dealer Lance Crawford, when asked about the deal. "It's small cheese." But the opportunity is open to all who subscribed to Christie's South Kensington sale catalogues, if Crawford's reading of signatures is anything to go by. The architect of the sale of Dudley Cain's collection to fixed-interest dealer Robert Pritchard, and to ABC Four Corners' expert on fakes, Mr Crawford purchased lot 162 at the Christie's South Kensington topographical sale of November 19. The lot was catalogued as the work of Norman Lloyd and titled Harbour from Bantry Bay. According to the catalogue it was “signed, and signed and inscribed on the reverse”. It measured 64 cm by 76 cm and had been expected to make £500 to £700. close inspection of the signature, however, showed it clearly to be the work of Penleigh Boyd, a much more financial commodity, says Mr Crawford. If by some magic the rest of the Lloyds in circulation could be turned into Boyds, few of the holders would raise an objection. Norman Lloyd’s work tends to be a drag on the market, and reports of the transaction may already have the conjun… looking out for, and closely at the signatures on, any work of Norman Lloyd. Lloyd, paradoxically, received international fame in his day – which was partly understandable as he lived overseas -  whereas Penleigh Boyd’s “overseas connection” was with the promotion of overseas and….. Australia, an unrewarding task at any time and certainly not an easy job in the 1920s. Norman Lloyd received an obituary (albeit a seven liner) in The Times in 1983 when he died in London at the age of 87. It said simply that he was a landscape painter, a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a member of the Royal Institute of Oil Painters. The paintings frequently pop up in America but at prices which make them hardly worth repatriating. He may have been discouraged by the reception of his 1926 exhibition at Macquarie Galleries in Sydney, for most of the work was passed over quickly by the Sydney Morning Herald: “There are four or five really excellent pictures in Mr Norman Lloyd’s exhibition … the rest only dwell again and again on a few subjects, and achieve little originality.” However, he later converted his palette to a high key, suggesting a vague brush with Matisse whose professional double (employed by Matisse to divert attention) he met in Paris, according to a humorous report in the Herald in December, 1946. Penleigh Boyd was more in the mainstream of Australian art, his esteem ultimately benefitting from the controversy aroused by his painting, “The Breath….  Spring”, exhibited in 1919. Purchased for the National Gallery by the Felton Bequest, the picture, of large masses of wattle blossom, became known as the “scrambled egg picture”. Penleigh Boyd won the Wynne Prize, and run over by a car in 1923, had a reputation as “an artist cut off in his prime”. Such at least was the headline by Arnold Shore in The Age, March 1900 (sic). … The Times, UK, 11 March 1983, page 12: Obituary Mr Norman Lloyd, the landscape painter, died on March 5 at the age of 87. He was a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a member of the Royal Institute of Oil Painters. Sydney Morning Herald, 28 December 1946: Matisse at Work By Irvine Douglas, our Staff Correspondent in London – By Air Mail An invitation to meet the great French modernist painter, Henri Matisse, at work on the bank of the Seine, was something the Australian artist Norman Lloyd, R.O.I., eagerly accepted on a recent visit to Paris. He had palled up with the art critic of one of the leading Parisian papers. “I know Matisse well,” the critic had said. “He is working on the river now and will, I am sure, be glad to meet you.“ So down to the river they went, and soon they saw a small crowd surrounding a man standing before an easel. On the back of the easel in large red letters was Matisse’s well-known signature. The man standing before the easel presented an extraordinary appearance. Flowing over his artist’s pale … smock was a huge red beard, …an abundant head of what was a small black beret. In a basket on the ground beside him was a small monkey, which every now and then he stooped to stroke. On the canvas were several brilliant red strokes, in the typical Matisse manner. Just that and nothing more. After a quick glance at this Bohemian figure, the art critic led Lloyd into a café some distance from the river. Presently they were followed by him of the flowing beard and beret and monkey. He took up his position at a table some distance away. Within a few minutes there entered a slight figure with the clothes of a clerk who should not have been seen in a café during working hours. A slight smile crossed his face when he saw the art critic. “Monsieur Matisse – Monsieur Lloyd,” said the critic, making a formal introduction. The clerk – Matisse himself – was about to sit down when he noticed the bearded one. Calling him over, he handed him a hundred franc note. The note was taken with a slight word of thanks, and was promptly spent on a drink, which was sipped at the far table. “I do not understand,” said the bewildered Lloyd, “That man in the beret – he is not Matisse?” “Oh, but no,” replied the critic. He works at the menagerie. This is his day off. Matisse, he just pays him to attract the people so that they do not detract the real Matisse at his work.” France Libre, 30 November 1946
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