Tina

I was lucky enough to pick up an iconic print last week.

Tina – this sultry beauty was a familiar sight in many a 1960s home.  She raised the blood pressure of numerous males … the father of a good friend had a ‘Tina’ hanging in his shed and I remember my uncle had one in his garage.

 

Tina was painted in 1961 by the virtually unknown Bristish artist Joseph Henry Lynch.  She became an instant hit when she went on sale in Boots (UK) three years later.   

She appeared in the 1971 cult classic ‘A Clockwork Orange’ ...

... and thirty years later her face appeared on the cover of Edwyn Collin’s hit single,

 ‘A Girl Like You’.  

She can be found framed under glass with a gilt frame or without glass in the more popular, at the time, cream frame.  The copy I have has the original cream frame and is still in great condition. 

 After the huge success of ‘Tina’, Lynch went on to produce many more prints, all of dark, exotic, voluptuous, scantily clad beauties, often in woodland settings, all of which have become prized by Lynch collectors.  

The prints sold in the hundreds of thousands.

Unbelievably, for an artist who had such huge appeal nothing more is known of him (or her … some people did question whether he may even have been a woman).  There is no information on his life, where he came from, his family … nothing.  As a protagonist of mass market art it is hard to believe that so little is known about him.

Lynch died in 1989, aged 78.  

Sadly, at the end of his life he destroyed many of his original paintings and donated the remaining few to charity.

A gallery of his paintings can be found here .

Tina will be coming to the Buttercross Vintage Market on September 8^th.