Adrian Feint

Adrian Feint (1894–1971) studied at the Sydney Art School with Julian Ashton after having served in the AIF in France and Belgium – and been praised for gallantry – in the First World War. Director of the Grosvenor Galleries from 1924 to 1928, he came to specialise in commercial art, illustration and bookplate design, and an exhibition of his bookplates was held at the Library of Congress, Washington DC in 1930. At the end of the 1930s he gave up on illustration to concentrate on oil painting, in the techniques of which he was advised by Margaret Preston. Over the 1940s he gained a modest following for his flower pieces and landscapes, of which The Jetties – Palm Beach (1942) is amongst the most potent. Sydney Ure Smith published Adrian Feint Flower Paintings in 1948. Remarkably handsome, with a reputation for impeccable taste, Feint lived austerely in a flat in Elizabeth Bay until his death in Sydney at the beginning of the 1970s.