Ruby Lindsay - Infinite Women

Born: 20 March 1885, Australia
Died: 12 March 1919
Country most active: Australia
Also known as: Ruby Lind, Mrs Will Dyson

The following is excerpted from The Dictionary of Australian Biography by Percival Searle, published in 1949 by Angus and Robertson and republished by Project Gutenberg.

In 1910 William Henry Dyson was married to Ruby Lindsay, a member of the well-known family of artists. They then went to London where Dyson was employed on the Weekly Despatch. In March 1919, to his great grief, his wife died. In the following year he published a selection of her work The Drawings of Ruby Lind accompanied by a little volume Poems in Memory of a Wife (dated 1919). His wife, known as “Ruby Lind”, the daughter of Dr Lindsay of Creswick, was born in 1887. She went to Melbourne at about the age of 20, and earned a precarious living as an illustrator. She found after her marriage that the business of being a good wife and mother limited her opportunities as an artist, but the work she did succeed in doing has much grace and charm, and few illustrators have had a more sensitive line. She died on 12 March 1919. The moving introduction by her husband to The Drawings of Ruby Lind, and his Poems in Memory of a Wife, will suggest something of what her loss meant to him and to her friends.