Norman Lindsay drew for The Bulletin every week from 1900 to 1958. Fifty-eight years of it. He lived up at Faulconbridge in the Blue Mountains, painted nudes, and got called anti-Christian, anti-social and degenerate for them. Two of his novels were banned in Australia, one of them until 1962. He also wrote The Magic Pudding, which is how most Australians meet him first.

Benevolence was published as a colour facsimile in 1934, worked up from his watercolour over hundreds of hours on eighteen hand-drawn lithographic plates by William Hackett of Sydney. Lindsay rated him, and said Hackett's lithographs of an earlier painting were the best prints he had ever seen.

Then Hackett died and the method died with him. The printed sheet says a handful of copies sold privately into the depression, a few more through a Sydney department store gallery, and the rest of the edition, some nineteen hundred prints, went as one lot and then vanished. They turned up in 1969, when workmen clearing rubbish out of a suburban Sydney garage found them. Ibis Imprints took the lot, discarded everything that had not survived, and released sixteen hundred and fifty.

This is number 1486.