ARTHUR BOYD

Niagara Galleries, Melbourne
Private collection, Perth
Private collection, Melbourne; purchased from the above by the present owner

Blue Chip III: The Collector's Exhibition, Niagara Galleries, Melbourne, 27 February - 31 March 2001, cat. 20, illus.

This work appears not to have been lined and it is framed with a backing board. Visible stretcher bar indentation along top edge and left hand of painting. There appears to be retouching along stretcher bar line.
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During the 1940s, Arthur Boyd's landscapes became increasingly populated with anecdote. Paintings of Rosebud of the late thirties tended to engaging transcripts of the scene, of creeks, buildings, haystacks and jetties, occasionally enlivened by the presence of a person or an animal. By 1946, as in Berwick Landscape, their painterly liveliness is greatly enhanced by detailed activities. The eye is led immediately to the thirsty bullock drinking mid stream, and moves progressively into the picture through the fisherman and the contentment of grazing cows. The rubber tyre on a post by the wooden jetty provides a further humanising touch. And then there is the rabbit in the left foreground. They are there to be read and enjoyed as integral parts of the scene; and given that the rabbit has long been a symbol of fecundity and the bull is no slouch, they emphasise the fertility and rich abundance of nature.  

Full of life and incident, Boyd's paintings of Berwick are numbered among his finest landscapes, especially those which revel in the influence of Pieter Bruegel the Elder - The Drover, 1948 (Kerry Stokes Collection) and Berwick Landscape, 1948 (Queensland Art Gallery). The present work is a harbinger of good things, both in its subject and in the rich development of Boyd's art. While the landscapes of 1948 and 1949, also replete with symbols of fertility, are more considered and composed, this splendid example from 1946 attracts by the immediacy of its vision the result of painting in the open air, directly from the motif. Not only are the senses drawn by the quality and texture of the paint, but the whole is enveloped in a sunny, breezy atmosphere of promise, appealing to the eyes and the emotions.