ARTHUR BOYD

Martin Boyd, Rome
Elder Smith Goldsborough Mort Limited, Adelaide;
transferred to Elders IXL in 1985;
transferred to The Foster's Collection, Melbourne

Oil and Tempera Paintings by Arthur Boyd, Kozminsky Galleries, Melbourne, 1949
Arthur Boyd Retrospective Exhibition, David Jones' Gallery, 4-16 September Sydney, 1950, cat. 7 as 'The Ploughman'
Arthur Boyd Retrospective Exhibition, Whitechapel Gallery, London, June - July 1962, cat. 36
Elders IXL Collection: Masterworks of Australian Painting and French Barbizon School: Colonial, Contemporary, Continental, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide Festival, 2 March - 1 April 1984, cat. 44, illus.

Franz Philipp, Arthur Boyd, Thames & Hudson, London, 1967, pp.  60, 245-6, cat. 5.12
Ron Radford, Elders IXL Collection Masterworks of Australian Painting and French Barbizon School, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 1984, p. 48, illus.
Ron Radford, Pamela Luhrs et al., Portrait of Australia 1830-1930, the Elders IXL Collection, Melbourne, 1986, p. 64, illus. pl. 42

One of Australia’s greatest twentieth-century artists, Arthur Boyd’s paintings of the landscape around his family home at Harkaway are among the most beautiful and lyrical of all his works. Whilst living there with his young family at his uncle Martin Boyd’s house, The Grange, he explored the lush, undulating, long-settled farming land in the area – nowadays an outer suburb of Melbourne. Here, in Man ploughing a Field, he evokes a vision of pastoral peace, of humankind and nature in complete harmony. The Grange had been in Arthur Boyd’s family since 1866 when the property was purchased by his great-grandfather W. A. C. a’Beckett. Arthur’s grandmother, Emma Minnie a’Beckett, married the senior Arthur Boyd (1862-1940), a contemporary of the Heidelberg School artists, and they lived at The Grange from 1886. Later, for many years, the house lay empty and largely neglected until Martin Boyd, the novelist, bought it from an a’Beckett cousin in 1948 – the year of the present painting – and invited Arthur and Yvonne Boyd to live there. This was a period when the artist worked with great freedom and joy. Martin Boyd was the painting’s first owner.

The exquisite detail and almost magical effects of light owe much to Boyd’s interest at the time in Old Master painting techniques. Man ploughing a Field is part of the same Brueghelian series as his larger Mining Town (National Gallery of Australia), Melbourne Burning (private collection), both 1946-7, and Boat Builders, Eden, 1948 (National Gallery of Australia). Combining oil paint with a delicate egg tempera medium, Boyd achieved jewel-like colour and astonishing luminosity. His image of the ploughman, quietly intent on seasonal labour whatever momentous events might unfold in the wider world, comes from a sixteenth century European painting that Boyd would then have known only in reproduction: Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, c.1558 (Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels). A similar Brueghelian ploughman had appeared two years earlier in Boyd’s great Biblical canvas, Abraham and the Angels of 1946 (Sotheby’s, 16 August 1999, lot 34).

Boyd’s Harkaway farmer inhabits a far happier landscape than Brueghel’s. The mood of Brueghel’s scene is somewhat foreboding. In contrast, this antipodean ploughman, with his companion and his animals, share in a peaceful, golden warmth and fertility far removed from the traumas of Europe in the post-War era. In Man ploughing a Field, at one time titled ‘The Ploughman’, there are obvious biblical and metaphorical associations. Boyd portrayed the undulating sweep of the countryside with a lively rhythmic flow. The formal, compositional harmony of association flows through into the individual images of habitation and life, especially the horse, the dog, the farmer at labour, and the ever-attendant black crows as the first reapers of the tilled soil. Another man cuts timber to expand the field. Mother nature and her body of soil is the feminine in a scene of male endeavour, the metaphor of ploughing and cropping occurring in the greatest of English literature as well as on the fertile fields of Harkaway and Berwick. Boyd imbues his painting with his characteristic feeling of intimacy with the subject, the panorama brought closer through identification with the foreground figures. Man ploughing a Field is a brilliant image of Boyd’s pastoral ideal, rare in being, as yet, not corralled in a public collection.