Emma Minnie BOYD

Australian 1858–1936
worked in England 1890–94

Emma Minnie à Beckett was seventeen when she painted this view of her family’s drawing-room at The Grange, Harkaway, on Easter Saturday 1875 (she dated her watercolour 27 March 1875). Minnie’s father was W. A. C. à Beckett, the eldest son of Sir William à Beckett, Victoria’s first Chief Justice. W. A. C.’s marriage in 1855 to the brewing heiress, Emma Mills, enabled him to build The Grange in 1866, and left him free, when not involved in public life, to improve his estate and indulge his passion for horseflesh, heraldry and genealogy.

The drawing-room of The Grange, shaded by a verandah, looked south over the garden to the bush beyond. The season is autumn: the carpets have been taken up and replaced with fibre matting, and one of the sash windows of the bay window is open to catch stray breezes. Minnie shows two figures, probably her elder sister Emily and a friend, at leisure in the bay. The stillness of the scene is disturbed only by the frolicking of the two kittens on the left. Minnie is a great recorder of the late-Victorian interior, and her pictures abound with details of furniture and decor, particularly floral arrangements, window hardware and shading.

On 14 January 1886 Minnie married Arthur Merric Boyd and founded the Boyd artistic dynasty. The Grange remained in the à Beckett and Boyd families until 1953. In 1949 one of Emma’s sons, the novelist Martin Boyd, commissioned his nephew, Arthur Boyd, to paint a mural cycle in the dining room of The Grange. The subjects included Susannah and the elders, The Prodigal Son and The Assumption of the Virgin. Sadly, the house was demolished in 1966 to make way for a quarry.

Terence Lane