Updated
The inspiration for an historic Melbourne mural is to be displayed for the first time since 1982 at the National Gallery of Australia.
I'll Put A Girdle Round About The Earth is a large-scale oil painting completed in 1933 by artist Napier Waller.
It acted as the blueprint for his mosaic mural in Collins Street, Melbourne.
It was commissioned for the facade of Newspaper House by art patron Theodore Fink, who was also a director of the Herald and Weekly Times.
Deborah Hart, NGA head of Australian art, said the painting highlighted key aspects of the Art Deco movement, such as modernity and technological advances.
"[The mural] really depicts a feeling that was very prominent after World War I ... the sense of wanting to build a new future."
The mural's name comes from a quote about super-fast travel in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.
"Later on, it came to represent great advances in communications," Ms Hart said.
"It was used to described submarine cables that would go across the globe ... this idea, very much pre the internet, that would link people around the Earth."
Waller (1893-1972) overcame the loss of his right arm at the Battle of Bullecourt in WWI to become one of Australia's finest Art Deco artists.
He is best remembered for his large-scale commissions, including the mosaics and stained-glass windows in the Hall of Memory at the Australian War Memorial.
"Napier Waller was an extraordinary artist," Ms Hart said.
"He had to retrain himself to draw and paint with his left hand.
"That's pretty extraordinary."
Waller's oil painting was left folded in storage for decades before being retrieved by the NGA's first director James Mollison for the gallery's opening in 1982.
The painting has undergone extensive conservation work.
It will be a key exhibit at the NGA's Art Deco exhibition which opens on February 16.
Topics: visual-art, library-museum-and-gallery, world-war-1, human-interest, canberra-2600
First posted