Bookplate:John Bruce Pye.

Biography:

Adrian George Feint (1894-1971),

Australia artist, was born at Narrandera, New South Wales, eldest of three children of native-born parents Samuel Feint, stationer, and his wife Catherine Charlotte, née Flood, grand-daughter of Edward Flood. In 1912 he entered the Sydney Art School where he studied under Julian Ashton and Elioth Gruner. Feint enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force on 21 January 1916, served with the 15th Field Ambulance on the Western Front from February 1917 and was praised in September 1918 for the gallantry he displayed near Péronne, France. He was granted three months leave in 1919 to study at the Académie Julien, Paris.

Discharged on 12 October 1919, Feint returned to the Sydney Art School which was noted for its teaching in ‘black and white’. He worked extensively for Sydney Ure Smith’s advertising agency, Smith & Julius, and provided decorations and cover designs for his magazines, Art in Australia (1928-40) and the Home. Regarded as having impeccable taste, Feint (with Walter Taylor) directed Grosvenor Galleries between 1924 and 1928. In the late 1920s he depicted himself as a connoisseur surrounded by objets d’art in his etched self-portrait, ‘The Collector‘.

Feint’s first etchings and his earliest bookplates were produced in 1922 and exhibited with the Society of Artists, Sydney, and the Australian Painter-Etchers Society. He showed his first wood-engravings in 1927 while studying design with Thea Proctor. His bookplates, including those produced for Olive King, Dorothea Mackellar, John Mullins, Frank Clune and the Duke and Duchess of York, attracted local and worldwide attention, culminating in an exhibition at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., in 1930. 

His decorative penwork and designs for private press books, such as those published by the Australian Limited Editions Society, were also highly praised. He painted tropical fish and parrots on the glass panels for the Australian pavilion at the New York World’s Fair (1939).