ARTHUR BOYD Australian, 1920-1999

Private collection

Australian Paintings, Christie's, 5 October 1971, lot 158 illus.

Private collection, New South Wales

During Boyd’s first years in London, in the 1960s, he was tremendously inspired by old master paintings hanging in the National Gallery. The large dog seen here is certainly influenced by the reddish-coloured dog grieving in a landscape in Piero di Cosimo’s fifteenth-century mythological subject often known as ‘The Death of Procris’. However the seated dog is also one of Boyd’s own ‘persistent images’, along with the motif in the background of a Narcissus-like figure looking into a dark round pool of water.

The Red Dog is both important and iconographically fascinating as a linking picture between Boyd’s early 1960s mythological paintings, completed in London and launched in his major retrospective exhibition of 1962, and the great ‘Bride’ series.  As is well known, those first ‘Bride’ paintings, painted from about 1957 to 1959, were inspired by a visit to Central Australia during which Boyd was much affected by the plight of the Aboriginal people there and witnessed the marriage of ‘half-caste’ Aboriginal women. An initial group was exhibited under the title ‘Love, marriage and death of a half-caste’ at Australian Galleries in 1958; others were completed in Melbourne and London not long afterwards.

Here in The Red Dog, the landscape setting makes clear reference to the arid interior of Australia, with scrubby saplings, spiky flowers and an extraordinary row of blackened tree trunks ranged across the horizon like assembled witnesses or the chorus in an ancient Greek tragedy. The powerful face of the central ‘woman-tree’ is immediately reminiscent of the Aboriginal bride in Boyd’s earlier Bride paintings. She also calls to mind another half-woman/half-tree: the nymph Daphne, pursued by the god Apollo and transformed into a laurel by her River God father. As in a number of Boyd’s other mythological subjects from the same time, nature itself ‘seems watching and threatening but also embracing and receiving’. ¹ The dog, often recognized as symbolic of fidelity and loyalty, was also for the ancient Romans emblematic of both death and healing. A likeness of a dog was sometimes found in graves and credited with healing the dead by enabling rebirth into the after-life.

The Red Dog is one of the most poetic and enigmatic paintings from this pivotal period of the artist’s career.  Perhaps Boyd’s gentle canine protagonist is dreaming, conjuring in imagination a series of timeless stories of thwarted love, impossible unions and mythical metamorphosis.

1. Philipp, F., Arthur Boyd, Thames & Hudson, London, 1967, p. 103.