ARTHUR BOYD Australian, 1920-1999

Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne

Collection of Ted Lustig, Melbourne

Autumn Exhibition 1976, Recent Acquisitions, Joseph Brown Gallery, Melbourne, 1 - 12 March 1976, cat. 47, illus. 

On loan to the Geelong Art Gallery, Geelong, Victoria, 6 December 2005 - August 2006

During the 1940s, the young Arthur Boyd drove his grandfather’s old Dodge to explore the Victorian countryside and after joining the army used his leave periods to travel further – to the upper reaches of the Yarra, Launching Place, Warburton and Woods Point – looking for subjects to paint. As his biographer Barry Pearce explains, ‘He was also looking for an approach to landscape that was different from the high keynote of the Heidelberg artists that he had adopted until then, and took an interest in some of the earlier colonial painters. He recalled a watercolour landscape by Louis Buvelot which had caught his attention at the National Gallery of Victoria. With its dark clump of trees it was at once quite different from the golden vision of Streeton, and yet still totally truthful to its subject'.¹

Cottles Bridge dates from the 1950s, when Boyd returned to theme of thick bushland after some years focusing on the golden wheatlands of the Wimmera. The painted surface is lusciously rich, with thick brushstrokes defining tangled branches and moist undergrowth. Water in a narrow creek sparkles and reflects the blue of the sky as a lone figure crosses over on a natural tree-trunk bridge. Boyd had been to the Eltham earlier, as a visitor to the artists’ colony at Monsalvat. In 1951 fellow artist Clifton Pugh purchased a property at Cottles Bridge which he named ‘Dunmoochin’ and which Boyd’s cousin, the architect Robin Boyd, described as ‘quite wonderfully Aussie-bush-bohemian’.² Boyd's larger painting of the same title formerly belonged to Kym Bonython and is now the collection of JGL Investments, Melbourne.³

The paintings of this period established Arthur Boyd as one of the most important Australian landscape painters of his generation.

1.     Pearce, B., Arthur Boyd, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1993, p. 16.
2. Serle, G., Robin Boyd: a life, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1996, p. 305.
3. Pearce, op. cit., cat. 81, illus. p. 96.