Norman Lloyd

Who was Norman Lloyd?

Norman Lloyd was an Australian landscape painter.

Norman Lloyd was born in 1895 near Newcastle, New South Wales, where he attended primary school. He left school in 1911 and started to work and study painting with Julian Ashton and James R. Jackson in Sydney.

On his 21st birthday in 1916 he enlisted with the Australian Imperial Forces and was transported to Europe where he was seriously wounded in battle a year later. After returning to Sydney in February 1918, he took up painting lessons at the Julian Ashton Art School again. From 1921 to 1926, Lloyd exhibited with galleries in Sydney and Melbourne, showing landscapes and Sydney harbour scenes painted in the more traditional style of his teachers.

From 1926 to 1929, Norman Lloyd visited Europe and travelled widely in Italy and France, exhibiting in the UK, France and Australia, culminating in a solo exhibition at Macquarie Galleries in Sydney.

In the 1930s, Lloyd migrated to London with his wife Edith for good, setting up a boarding house in upmarket St Johns Wood and establishing himself quickly in the new society, being a kind, generous and interested man with a broad horizon. His mansion became a meeting point and home for many Australian expats, among them painters Will Ashton, Alison Rehfisch and George Duncan. The Lloyds hosted pianist Nancy Weir, and war correspondent Harold Fyffe was a close friend, who introduced Lloyd to H G Wells and George Bernard Shaw.