Lin Bloomfield (b. 1931), former gallerist and author, was the daughter of a schoolteacher and spent her early life moving around regional New South Wales. Upon graduation from Armidale Teachers’ College - stipulating only that she did not want to be posted to northwestern New South Wales - she was posted to Trundle, northwestern New South Wales, where she taught from 1951 to 1970. In the period in which she was a student, the walls of the Teachers’ College were densely hung with paintings from the Hinton Collection, which was later transferred to the New England Regional Art Museum. Having thus become familiar with art, she opened a small gallery in the Trundle Hotel called the Swingle Bar, selling works that she purchased in Sydney by artists including Norman Lindsay, Salvatore Zofrea and Nora Heysen. Immediately after moving to Sydney in 1973, she opened a gallery in Crows Nest; a couple of years later, she relocated to Sutherland Street, Paddington. Alan McCulloch credits Bloomfield Galleries as ‘especially significant in establishing the work of Sydney modernists such as Frank and Margel Hinder’. From 1973 she served on Gough Whitlam’s Arts Advisory Board; from 1976 she was on the advisory board of the Norman Lindsay Gallery at Springwood. She served on the board of the University of New South Wales from 1983 to 1988 and was chair of the Commercial Galleries Association from 1986 to 1988. She ran the gallery until 1994, when her daughter took it over and moved it to North Sydney; now, her daughter operates a reduced iteration of the gallery in Bungendore. In 1979 Bloomfield was commissioned to write The World of Norman Lindsay. From that time she worked on her eleven published books, including the authoritative catalogue raisonné of Lindsay’s etchings, which took her six years. In 2017 she relocated to Canberra ,where she lives surrounded by her collections of Australian art works and international antiquities.
Collection: National Portrait Gallery
Gift of Lin Bloomfield 2017
© Enid Hawkins (nee Hinder)
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