Norman and Rose: lifelong love

She remembered ‘he was very slim and alert, and wearing a high, stiff collar’. He remembered ‘we both stared at each other … then burst into a hearty laugh’. And so it began.

Artist Julian Ashton introduced Rose Soady as ‘Sydney’s best-looking and best-figured model’, wrote Norman Lindsay in his autobiography My Mask, adding ‘which she unquestionably was’, as he ruminated on having a premonition of their romance. Rose recalls in Model wife: My life with Norman Lindsay that, much to her mother’s consternation, she quickly became immersed in Lindsay’s ‘mad household’. Sudden, ‘free’ and improvised dramatic tableaux for the clique’s cameras were nothing unusual, and Rose appears here with Norman’s friend, the cartoonist Will Dyson. Will – falling in love with Rose about the same time Rose and Norman realised they were in love with each other – returned to Melbourne and married Norman’s sister Ruby. Tragically, Ruby became victim to the 1919 influenza epidemic. Norman Lindsay’s paintings were known for being overtly sensual and challenging the moralising age in which he produced them. Here, 70 years after their first meeting, Rose poses in front of her love’s work for Anthony Browell’s camera.