Arthur BOYD

Australian 1920–99
worked in England 1959–68

In 1945 Arthur Boyd married Yvonne Lennie at Oakleigh, a suburb of Melbourne. They and friends like John Perceval ran the Arthur Merric Boyd Pottery in nearby Murrumbeena. Arthur was both potter and decorator. He began a series of paintings based on the bible, a book his father read every day in a family where the literal practise of Christian beliefs and values had been habitual for generations. Arthur Boyd, interested in Northern Renaissance art, transported scenes like those of the Flemish painters Jan and Pieter Brueghel into a contemporary setting. Christ bears the Cross through a mob of people at what looks like a Victorian country-town agricultural show, with soldiers, ladders, cars and sideshow tents all mixed in with the site of Golgotha. Beyond the Bosch-like nude riding backwards on the back of a man and death-masked figures crouching beneath her as if from a German Expressionist painting, a serene little township with blooming fruit trees, football ground, church and train stretches along the road. To the left a cemetery rears prominent white crosses, a tree has grotesque white figures in the branches and lovers embrace beneath, representing Boyd’s theme of interchangeable love and death.

Jennifer Phipps

In the 1940s Arthur Boyd’s uncle, the novelist Martin Boyd, bought an old family house, The Grange, at Harkaway outside Melbourne and invited the Boyds to stay. While painting interior murals, Arthur Boyd began a series of landscapes of the pretty, undulating country. The wheatfield, 1948, is a pastoral idyll where wheat, creatures, fences and farms have their own wiry life and certainty within a general landscape. The evil and folly of the biblical paintings has lifted and the intimacy with a living countryside remains. Arthur Boyd made this his own in paintings of a sensual, vital Earth.

Jennifer Phipps

Freedom and intimacy with landscape continues in the more loosely brushed Bride series Boyd began in Melbourne in 1954.1 By 1959 he had moved to London, and continued the Bride series there.

In 1951 the Boyd family travelled to Alice Springs for several weeks. The impoverished and outcast lives of Aboriginal people were the impetus. Here the bride, searching for the lost groom, painted towards the end of the series, is outcast in a landscape dominated by voyeuristic red-eyed birds. The bride hovers as in a dream over the groom, whose legs submerge in the water, and red uniform coat and blue head sink into the bank. Franz Philip wrote in 1967: ‘[I]t is the theme of the thwarted lovers which comes to the fore, which turns into general pictorial meditations on the destinies of Eros, on the myth of sex.’2

1  Half caste wedding, exhibited Victorian Artists’ Society, Melbourne, in 1954, reproduced in Architecture and Arts, May 1954, p. 41.

2  F. Philip, Arthur Boyd, London & New York, 1967, p. 93.

Jennifer Phipps