ARTHUR BOYD Australian, 1920-1999

Purchased from the Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne

Collection of Ted Lustig, Melbourne

Arthur Boyd first visited the Shoalhaven River upstream from Nowra in 1971 and two years later he purchased the riverfront property, ‘Riversdale’. Through the 1970s the Shoalhaven landscape became the chief source of inspiration for all Boyd’s work. He purchased the neighbouring property, ‘Bundanon’, in 1979. As his biographer Janet McKenzie has explained, ‘The natural beauty of the Shoalhaven area caused Boyd to marvel constantly… Implied in Boyd’s celebration is the message that unless environmental issues are acknowledged and steps are taken to preserve the wilderness, it will all be destroyed… Boyd’s painting has altered our perceptions of the landscape in Australia profoundly’.¹

This was a landscape Boyd came to know intimately and in all its moods. Hillside (Shoalhaven) is pure landscape, without any of the literary or religious significance with which he sometimes imbued his Shoalhaven paintings. The characteristic vertical emphasis of the bush vegetation, the primeval stillness under clear blue sky and brilliant light, reveal a remarkable continuity with earlier interpretations of the Australian landscape, such as Tom Roberts’s iconic Bailed Up of the 1890s. However, for Boyd, such parallels would only ever be points of departure and the flat pattern he evokes is distinctly and deliberately modernist. Hillside (Shoalhaven) is particularly rich in detail, with jewel-like colours sprinkled amidst the muted backdrop of rocky terrain, and the bright green foliage of Xanthorea or grass trees signaling ever-present renewal even in this driest of continents.

1. McKenzie, J., Arthur Boyd at Bundanon, Academy Editions, London, 1994, p. 42.