ARTHUR BOYD 1920-1999

When Arthur Boyd visited the desert regions of Central Australia in 1951, he could hardly have imagined that the works of art resulting from that experience would, through a period of some years' gestation and fruition, become the basis of his international recognition. His work is now represented in the Australian national and all state galleries and his 'Bride' series, in which Card Players is one of the most memorable images, is ranked among his greatest achievements.

Arthur Boyd was born in 1920 in Melbourne, into a dynasty of artists. Although he enrolled intermittently at the National Gallery of Victoria's art school during the 1930s, he learnt primarily from his family and their wider intellectual circle in Melbourne: painting techniques, ceramic art, art history, biblical history and an intense emotional engagement with news brought from Europe by displaced immigrant friends.
Then, as Barry Pearce explains, Boyd found in the Aboriginal settlements near Alice Springs, in Central Australia, a whole race of displaced people, caught between two cultures, 'and the implication in it of something universal'. He saw and sketched shanty towns, shearers, card players, tribespeople, and witnessed an Aboriginal marriage with 'half-caste' women dressed in wedding gowns. Although profoundly dismayed by the plight of the Aboriginal people he met - and aware that this was a contemporary tragedy unknown to most urban Australians - he was not interested in making a social-realist record. Rather, he took the idea of a half-caste groom and a half-caste bride and constructed a kind of ballad or a 'passion play about the tribulations associated with the pursuit of love'.(1)
Ursula Hoff explains that, beginning around 1949, Boyd invented a new type of ceramic which combined translucency of colour with the format and figurative content of oil paintings. He made tiles 'and, mixing various coloured oxides with clay to the consistency of oil paint, covered them with compositions. They were then sprinkled with lead glaze and fired in a slow kiln'.(2) Some of these ceramic paintings revived his earlier religious subjects. Others tackled entirely new themes. Although Card Players was dated to 1952-3 by Boyd's first biographer, Franz Philipp, this seems unlikely. Whilst it may well be a 'first take' for Boyd's great Shearers playing for a Bride of 1957 (National Gallery of Victoria), it is unlikely to have been completed very much earlier than the larger painting. The Bride theme really only emerged in 1955, perhaps partly inspired by Boyd seeing Chagall's work in the French exhibition of 1953.
Ursula Hoff has pointed out that the 'strange Trinity of black men' calls to mind the composition of Boyd's earlier masterpiece Abraham and the Angels, 1946 (Sotheby's, 16 August 1999, lot 34).(3) In fact Boyd had sketched just such a trio during his visit to Alice Springs, playing cards outside their tin hut.(4) Here in
Card Players they are brought dramatically to centre stage, one of the men seemingly sitting on his bride's train as though his physical weight might hold on to his fleeting dream. They are completely intent on their game; while the Bride, offering a bouquet, is beset by 'beastly sex' - in the form of the Ramox, one of Boyd's most persistent personal symbolic images. Card Players is one of the most important smaller works by Arthur Boyd to have come to light in recent years. It was originally owned by the artist's cousin, Mr W. (Bill) A. K. a'Beckett, and has remained in his family collection until n