Arthur Merric Bloomfield Boyd (24 July 1920 – 24 April 1999) was a leading Australian painter of the middle to late 20th century. Boyd's work ranges from impressionist renderings of Australian landscape to starkly expressionist figuration, and many canvases feature both. Several famous works set Biblical stories against the Australian landscape, such as The Expulsion (1947–48), now at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Having a strong social conscience, Boyd's work deals with humanitarian issues and universal themes of love, loss and shame.
Boyd was a member of the Antipodeans, a group of Melbourne painters that also included Clifton Pugh, David Boyd, John Brack, Robert Dickerson, John Perceval and Charles Blackman.
The Boyd Family line of successive and connective artists includes painters, sculptors, architects and other arts professionals, commencing with Boyd's grandmother Emma Minnie Boyd and her husband Arthur Merric Boyd, Boyd's father Merric and mother Doris; 'She was the backbone of the family' recalls Boyd "without her, the entire family would have fallen apart", uncle Penleigh Boyd (and his son, Arthur's cousin, Robin), uncle Martin Boyd, and siblings Guy, David and Lucy. His other sister Mary Boyd, married first John Perceval, and then later Sidney Nolan, both artists. Boyd's wife, Yvonne Boyd (née Lennie) is also a painter; as are their children Jamie, Polly, and Lucy.
In 1993, Arthur and Yvonne Boyd gave family properties comprising at Bundanon on the Shoalhaven River to the people of Australia. Held in trust, Boyd later donated further property, artwork, and the copyright to all of his work.
Early years and background
Boyd was born at Murrumbeena, Victoria, the son of Doris Boyd and her husband Merric, both potters and painters. Boyd's sisters Lucy and Mary were both artists as well as both of Boyd's younger brothers; David was a painter, and Guy a sculptor. After leaving school aged 14 years, Boyd briefly attended night classes at the National Gallery School in Melbourne where Jewish immigrant artist Yosl Bergner introduced Boyd to writers such as Dostoyevsky and Kafka and influenced his humanitarian values and social conscience. Boyd later spent some time living on the Mornington Peninsula at Rosebud with his grandfather, the landscape painter Arthur Merric Boyd, a primary guide to the formation of his talent. Early paintings were portraits and of seascapes of Port Phillip created while he was an adolescent, living in the suburbs of Melbourne. He moved to the inner city where he was influenced by his contact with European refugees. Reflecting this move in the late 1930s, his work moved into a distinct period of depictions of fanciful characters in urban settings.
Career
Military service
Boyd (Service number V101720) was 20 when conscripted to serve in the militia from 12 May 1941 until 25 March 1944. Initially serving with the 2nd Cavalry Division, which later became the 2nd Armoured Division (Australia), Boyd was transferred to the 4th Division (Australia) for full time service, and then Army Headquarters Cartography Company. Boyd predominantly served in the Bendigo area as a cartographer. Boyd's expressionistic wartime paintings included images of disabled people and those considered unfit to serve. These works have been described as depicting "the dispossessed and the outcast".
Artistic career
Following the war, Boyd, together with John Perceval founded a workshop at Murrumbeena and turned his hand to what he since childhood had seen his father's hands occupied with, pottery. Later came ceramic painting and sculpture. Although Boyd was the closest of friends with Albert Tucker, Joy Hester and Sidney Nolan and the art patrons John and Sunday Reed, the modernist Heide Circle and its hierarchical structure did not beckon him overtly as his position in the Boyd family gave him the fullest identity in itself.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Boyd traveled to Victoria's Wimmera country and to Central Australia including Alice Springs and his work turned towards landscape paintings. During this period, perhaps his best-known work comes from his Love, Marriage and Death of a Half-Caste Bride series of 31 paintings, also known as The Bride, that imagined an Aboriginal person of mixed descent as a neglected outsider. First exhibited in Melbourne in April 1958, the series met a mixed reaction, as it did later that year in Adelaide and Sydney. Following the 1999 acquisition of Reflected Bride 1 by the National Gallery of Australia, the gallery's director Brian Kennedy commented in 2002:
In 1956, Boyd's ceramic sculpture 'Olympic Pylon' was installed in the forecourt of the Melbourne Olympic Swimming Pool.
