Arthur Boyd - Catalogue

Arthur Boyd 9 Sep - 1 Oct 2023

Sales: Julie Collins -Director gallery@djprojects.net 0417324795 Free delivery and installation within Victoria.

Shipping arranged interstate and Overseas. & Gallery accepts Atrt Money www.artmoney.com 21 Morce Ave Sorrento, Victoria, Australia www.andgalleryaustralia.net & Gallery is part of the djprojects family of art related businesses. www.djprojects.net

Arthur Merric Bloomfield Boyd (1920-1999) With no formal art studies other than a year of night classes at National Gallery Art School, Melbourne, Arthur learned about art at an early age within the family circle. His father, Merric Boyd, was a potter and sculptor and his mother, Doris Boyd, was a painter and potter. His grandparents, Arthur Merric Boyd and Emma Minnie Boyd, were both landscape painters.

His uncle, Penleigh Boyd, was a painter. His brother, David, and sisters Lucy and Mary are painters and his brother, Guy, a potter.

He attended Murrumbeena State School, Victoria, and won many prizes for drawing. At the age of seventeen he went to live with his grandfather who taught him the rudiments of painting in the Heildelberg impressionist tradition.

He held his first one-man show in Melbourne in 1939 and shortly afterwards joined the army where he was to spend three years, mostly in the Field Survey Corps. Here he met John Perceval, later to become his brother-in-law.

After discharge from the army in 1943, he founded a pottery at Murrumbeena with John Perceval and Peter Herbst. He decided to devote all his time to painting and ceramic sculpture in 1949 and at the invitation of Lloyd Rees became involved in the CAS in Melbourne.

During the 1940s his work went through several phases including the painting of a large mural at the home of his uncle, Martin Boyd, at Harkaway near Berwick, Victoria. A series of landscapes of north-west Victoria, a nine metre ceramic sculpture he built in Melbourne for the Olympic Games swimming pool in 1955 and he celebrated his ‘Half-Caste Bride’ series painted 1957-59 after an earlier visit to Central Australia.

A prize winning film was made in Melbourne about his ‘Half-Caste Bride’ series by Tim Burstall and Patrick Ryan in 1959. During the 1960s he lived mostly with his family in London, exhibited widely and established an international reputation including a Romeo and Juliet ceramic Triptych in 1964 to honour Shakespears’s 400 year anniversary.

USA 1967; ‘Landscape and Image’, Australian Gallery Directors Council Travelling Exhibition to Indonesia 1978; Smithsonian Institute, Washington DC 1985; Commonwealth Institute, London 1988; Venice Biennale 1988; Australian Consulate General, Los Angeles 1987.

He returned to Australia during 1971-72 for six months at ANU, Canberra, as a resident Fellow in Creative Arts. In 1975 he presented a large collection of sculptures, etchings and paintings to the ANG Canberra and in 1984 was commissioned to design the tapestry for the reception hall at new Parliament House, Canberra. Worked in UK for part of 1989-90.

EXHIBITIONS Arthur Boyd held many one-man shows in Australia and overseas over the years including Zwemmer Gallery, London; Retrospective shows at Whitechapel Gallery, London 1962; Demarco Gallery, Edinburgh 1969; ANU Canberra 1971-72 and Skinner Gallery Perth 1971; Fischer Fine Art UK 1973,80,83,86; Rudy Komon Gallery 1978,8 Fremantle Arts Centre 1979; Australian Galleries Melb. 1976,81,82,(retro),85,87;Qld. Uni. Art Museum 1982; Hong Kong Arts Centre, Hong Kong 1983;Wagner Gallery 1984,87; AGSA 1984; BMG Adelaide 1984,88; Tokyo and Kyoto, Japan (Wagner Gallery) 1984; von Bertouch, Newcastle 1986,87,89; Works Gallery, Geelong 1985; Solander Canberra 1985; Holdsworth 1985; HPAC 1988; BMG Sydney 1988,89(retro); Wagner Gallery 1989.

Significant group shows include Venice Biennale 1958 and Australian Painters 1964-66 Exhibition (Mertz Collection) Corcoran Gallery; Washington DC USA 1967; ‘Landscape and Image’, Australian Gallery Directors Council Travelling Exhibition to Indonesia 1978; Smithsonian Institute, Washington DC 1985; Commonwealth Institute, London 1988; Venice Biennale 1988; Australian Consulate General, Los Angeles 1987.

Arthur Passed away in 1999 and his work contiunes to attract significant prices on the secondary market.

& Gallery would like to acknowlegde, Australian Galleries’ long relationship with The Arthur Boyd Estate and the Bundanon Trust.

Skate and Unicorn signed Arthur Boyd (oil, lower right) oil on canvas 121 x 152 cm. $170,000 When Arthur Boyd was a young artist, living with his grandfather at Rosebud on Port Phillip Bay, he was struck by the extraordinary forms of skates he saw washed up on the beach.

He said: I used to watch the fisherman throw their kite-shaped skates up on the shores … Skates swim with a pink underside human-like face looking down into the water, and when these tender undersides were exposed on the sand, they seemed to symbolize absolute vulnerability.

Four decades later Boyd enjoyed painting skates, sometimes as subjects for still life, and at others incorporating symbolic associations. In March 1980, there was an exhibition of Boyd’s paintings of skates and other fish at Bonython Art Gallery, Adelaide Festival of Arts.

The Skate and the Unicorn also comes from a private collection and sits themeacially with the prints. This painting has never been exhibited in Australia.

Provenance: 1980 | Purchased [presumably] from Bonython Gallery during the Adelaide Festival of Arts in 1980, entering a private collection, then transported by same owners to the UK thereafter.

2016 | Purchased in London and brought to Australia thereafter by the current custodian.

Several paintings which include a skate and the same type of blue/grey background have been publicly exhibited, toured, and are held in major collections. All are listed as having been painted circa 1979- early eighties and are of identical sizes.

Condition: The painting appears in excellent condition with minor surface dust consistent with age.

The Lady and the Unicorn Series ‘The lady and the unicorn’ series was inspired by the beautiful medieval tapestries by the same title at the Cluny Museum in Paris. Created around 1500, The lady and the unicorn tapestries have been the subject of literary inspiration, scholarly speculation and wonder ever since.

Among these were Australian artist Arthur Boyd and expatriate poet Peter Porter who, from 1973 to 1975, collaborated on a suite of 24 etchings and accompanying poems on the theme. Neither artist nor poet viewed the tapestries in the flesh. Boyd and Porter’s adaption tells an alternative version of the myth sparked by the exquisite beauty and enigmatic characters of the French tapestries.

Both Porter and Boyd were living in London at the time, and their highly successful partnership was based on friendship and an understanding that their independent visions in words and images would allow them to flourish side by side. In Porter’s version of the story, the unicorn — the only animal not to be allowed on Noah’s Ark — falls in love with a maiden, who initially reciprocates but becomes bored. The Emperor, who desperately wants to capture the rare creature, sends out his hunters after the maiden betrays the unicorn.

In addition to the book he published with Porter, Boyd produced this separate edition of the works where he was able to ensure the subtlety of the etchings and tonal range of aquatints, exceeding the quality of the reproductions in the books. The poems by Peter Porter are published in: The lady and the unicorn: Arthur Boyd and Peter Porter, Secker & Warburg, London, 1975 and The lady and the unicorn: a collaboration between Arthur Boyd and Peter Porter, Bundanon Trust, 2016.

These prints come directly from the family who funded the printing of the editions and without their support the series of prints would not exsist.

This is the first time these particulary prints have been offered for sale and a second time a group exhibition of the series has been mounted in a commerical gallery. The first being at Tolanro Galleries in 1975.

Christ names His cross for the unicorn 900 x 700mm Etching and aquatint Edition: 22/45 $3,300

The unicorn in the forest 900 x 700mm Etching and aquatint Edition: 22/45 $3,300

Enter the emperor I Etching and aquatint Edition: 22/45 $3,300

Enter the emperor II 900 x 700mm Etching and aquatint Edition: 22/45 $3,300

The hunter’s set out to trap the unicorn I 900 x 700mm Etching and aquatint Edition: 22/45 $3,300

The hunters set out to trap the unicorn Etching and aquatint Edition: 22/45 $3,300

The unicorn sees the lady Etching and aquatint Edition: 26/45 $3,300

The unicorn’s love dance. The lady’s acceptance 900 x 700mm Etching and aquatint Edition: 22/45 $3,300

The unicorn in love 900 x 700mm Etching and aquatint Edition: 22/45 $3,300

The unicorn before the emperor 900 x 700mm Etching and aquatint Edition: 22/45 $3,300

The unicorn and the angel 900 x 700mm Etching and aquatint Edition:18/45 $3,300

The lady’s bridal night 900 x 700mm Etching and aquatint Edition: 27/45 $3,300

The hunters trap the unicorn 900 x 700mm Etching and aquatint Edition: 22/45 $3,300

Death of the unicorn 900 x 700mm Etching and aquatint Edition: 22/45 $3,300

The unicorn’s prison song 900 x 700mm Etching and aquatint Edition: 22/45 $3,300

Epilogue 900 x 700mm Etching and aquatint Edition: 22/45 $3,300

Figure by a Creek with a Book, 1973 In 1970 Arthur Boyd had completed the Nebuchadnezzar series, one of the defining groups of paintings in this distinguished artist’s career. These large brightly coloured and fundamentally literary works sharply contrast with equally important landscapes, some with figures, which Boyd produced in the following years. These landscapes represent a return to one of Boyd’s core interests and exemplify the binary nature of this restlessly productive artist. One minute he is deftly probing the boundaries of allegory with metaphysical pyrotechnics, next minute he brings the same technical flourish to work which is naturalistic, earthy, and almost homely. This was a characteristic of his work since the earliest days of his career. Throughout, his work relied on the way one extreme is illuminated by an admixture of the other. In this respect he is following in the footsteps of the artist who was one of the most important influences in his early years, the Flemish artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c1525- 1569).

Figure by a Creek with a Book belongs to an extended group of works painted from 1972, shortly after Boyd had (after twelve years residence in England) returned to Australia. Painted a short time later, this painting is a remarkable example of the naturalistic tendency in Boyd’s work. It also makes references to some of his favourite painters: Rembrandt (1606-1669), Manet (1832-1883) and Tintoretto (1518-1595), all artists known for painting nude ‘bathers’ in the landscape, often using the biblical subject of Susannah and the Elders. In this case the nude is Yvonne, Boyd’s wife. The figure has the dignity of a classical nude, and yet she is painted naturalistically to a fault - rather warts-and-all, and possibly erring on the wrong side of chivalry, but nonetheless remarkably direct and uncompromising. Although the subject of this painting is clearly a nude, Figure by a creel with a book, like other examples of this series gives as much weight to the figure as its surroundings.

Figure by a Creek with a Book, 1973 113.5 x 108.8cm Oil on canvas $85,000