28.4 x 23.6 cm
Published: 1994
Edition: 550
Publisher: Odana Editions

Reference
Norman Lindsay Etchings: Catalogue Raisonné (Odana Editions and Josef Lebovic Gallery, 2006, cat.198)
Represented
Art Gallery of Western Australia
Ballarat Fine Art Gallery
British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings
National Trust Norman Lindsay Gallery and Museum

In 1920 Norman sent Hugh McCrae the etching Desire. It so affected McCrae that he wrote a new version of the poem Pantera, (the one which was ultimately published in Idyllia), dedicated to Rose. McCrae wrote:
I do not think I have told you the tremendous impression I received when I unwrapped Desire ... I sat at my desk with the feeling of a new aura mingling with my own. The sensation was so much a nervous one that my hands, my body and face became bathed in perspiration ... I was unable, as if pressed within an invisible frame, to draw a full breath; and when I reached for my pen and began to write the new Pantera I am certain it was with some volition other than my own.

McCrae also wrote a description of Desire:
It makes me happy to see people at last moving eagerly towards your work without any hypocritical reservation and even young girls of eighteen may now, minus either censure or the wearing of masks, look upon Desire and say how much they feel within themselves when the moon makes a shadow of heir hair on the pillows, or when a thrush is singing, or when a white cat goes under the Persian Lilac and the grass moves after the cat has gone.

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