ARTHUR BOYD

Collection of Guelda Pyke, Melbourne
Fine Australian Paintings and Drawings, Sotheby's, Melbourne, 30 July 1986, lot 85
Martin Browne Fine Art, Sydney, 1992
Private collection, Sydney, 1992
Private collection, Sydney

Arthur Boyd's best paintings invariably work on several levels and 'innocent' landscapes like The White Cockatoo are no exception. His Wimmera paintings date from the summer of 1948-49 onwards when he painted at Horsham and later travelled to the Grampians and the further wheat belt country of north western Victoria. They include a number of imposing works such as Irrigation Lake, Wimmera, circa 1950 (National Gallery of Victoria) and Wimmera Landscape I (Ploughed Wheat Belt) once in the Kym Bonython Collection. When exhibited in Boyd's first retrospective exhibition, held at the David Jones Art Gallery, Sydney, in 1950, they were quickly snapped up by perceptive buyers - Melbourne acquiring the work mentioned above and the Art Gallery of New South Wales purchasing Mid-day, the Wimmera, circa 1950. Following his famous Berwick landscapes of the late forties, Boyd's early Wimmera landscapes are characterised by the thick texture of the oil paint applied with palette knife, as in The White Cockatoo, giving way to smoother, thinner paint work and the use of tempera in the landscapes of the early 1950s. The vigorous application of the paint in the present work and its companions give them a feeling of immediacy, the artist's ready response to the first impact of the new and open landscape of the area, heightened by the feeling if not always the fact of having been painted en plein air.

The painterly vigour is the link to other levels, a kind of metaphor of fecundity and healthy growth, for this is the wheat bowl of Victoria. A powerful and recurrent Boydian theme is the interrelationship of man and natural forces, of man and beast, given centre stage in the rearing blackness of the horn twisted ram, whose leg is savaged by a dog. It is a metaphor of unleashed dark forces, one in Boyd's armoury of semi mythical creatures. The painting also introduces other visual metaphors that populate later works - the white cockatoo and the dead tree trunk and the drover and his flock heading into the depths of the composition are found again a few years later in Eaglehawk Landscape, 1956. The Australian Impressionists's noble images of the wool industry, of droving are extended and transformed under the brush of Arthur Boyd, in works as strongly Australian as any paintings before or since.