ARTHUR BOYD

Traditions in Australian art were strong in the Melbourne of the forties and fifties. Artists worked at locations made famous by the Australian impressionists, and embraced ideas and motifs that had interested earlier artists. A classic example is Arthur Boyd's Autumn Afternoon, Mentone, 1957-58 with its clear references to Charles Conder's A Holiday at Mentone of 1888.

Boyd's Eaglehawk Landscape is redolent with colonial and impressionist associations. First is the colonial notion of 'weird melancholy' associated with the Australian bush; what the early Australian novelist Marcus Clarke called 'the strange scribblings of nature learning how to write'.¹ There is a touch of this in Boyd's Eaglehawk, a blend of the familiar and the alien, of sunbaked stillness interrupted by the squawking, swooping cockatoo, or the delicate beauty of the wildflowers in the harshness of the barren land. Moreover, the locale was once one of the richest on the great Bendigo goldfields, famous for its spectacular returns. S. T. Gill, the chronicler of the Victorian gold rushes, visited Eaglehawk in 1852 and recorded the lively scenes. His numerous watercolours and lithographs include back views of horses and carts, and bullock wagons, a reminiscent whiff of which provides the central motif in Boyd's painting. Boyd's farmer heads his horse and cart homeward on the far horizon. Such associations speak of ongoing creative responses to the interpretation of our relationship to the land. Although related, each reflects its time and interests.

Boyd painted a number of views in the Bendigo area in the 1950s. Landscape near Eaglehawk, Victoria of 1949-50 is said to have been intended as a gift to Queen Elizabeth II on her visit to Victoria in 1954.² Of less grand association, but of great art are Cyanide Tanks, Bendigo, 1950, in the collection of the Art Gallery of South Australia, Old Mining Country (near Bendigo) 1951 is in the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, and Pinchin's Farm (near Maldon, Central Victoria) 1956-57 in the Bendigo Art Gallery. The similarity of motifs in The Rabbiters, 1953 (Art Gallery of Western Australia) to those in Eaglehawk Landscape, suggest another work of Eaglehawk connection, sharing, through rocks, cave and erect trunk, the same symbolic artifices of erotic association. Eaglehawk Landscape and its companion works present a specific place among the many identifiable faces of Australia. Conceived within the interests of the time and the sensibilities of a most gifted artist, each is enlivened with typical Boydian anecdote and incident and enjoys a respected place in the history of Australian art.

1. Marcus Clarke, quoted in Smith, B., Australian Painting 1788-1960, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1962, p. 56.
2. Philipp, F., Arthur Boyd, Thames & Hudson, London, 1967, p. 246.