Nude-Art-Sampler

Francisco de Almada (Francisco Simões)

2 figuras femininas

Norman Lindsay (1879-1969) Australian

“Rita”      c1935

It was not until the late 1930’s that Norman found his ‘perfect model’, Rita Lee. Rita modelled for Norman from 1938 until 1942, when she married artist and photographer George Young.

 Rita was 18 when she began modelling and she had worked for other artists for about a year before she was introduced to Norman Lindsay. She remembers being very nervous as she walked up the stairs to his studio, but this quickly disappeared when the door was opened by “a little man with beautiful blue dancing eyes who had a palette and brushes in his hand”.

As for Norman, this is what he said of Rita: “One of those, at least, arrived as the perfect model for the métier of oil painting. That was Rita, a quiet reticent girl who seldom spoke, but who secreted within her all those emotional intensities from which any variation on the feminine image may be extracted.”Rita’s mother was Spanish and her father Chinese and her unusual colouring appealed to Norman; he called it “buttery coloured”. She was tall and long limbed with dark, glossy shoulder length hair and slightly slanted soft brown eyes.