Gamecocks, Spain

Lionel Lindsay was an inveterate traveller with a passion for southern Spain, and made many etchings on the subject.

He first visited there in 1902, full of romantic preconceptions of Spanish life fostered by his reading as a young man. He came
to love the sun-parched landscape and the customs, food and way of life of the peasants with whom he lived and worked,
but most of all the Moorish architecture and other remnants of Arab influence in the south. He described the town of Cordoba
in his 1964 autobiography, The comedy of life; … Cordoba was in tune with my soul. No haste, no Saint-Simonian fallacies, no
noisy machinery disturbed in this haunt of yesterday the impression of perpetual afternoon. It satisfied my Australian
nostalgia for antiquity, and fortified my antagonism to the innovations that effect beauty and the patina of time.

from Anne Ryan, 'Australian etchings and engravings 1880s–1930s from the Gallery's collection', AGNSW, Sydney 2007