ARTHUR BOYD

Savill Galleries, Sydney
Private collection, Sydney; purchased from the above

This painting has not been lined and has the original stretcher. The frame is a traditional style gold frame with painted timber slip. No visible defects and no evidence of retouching confirmed by UV inspection.
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In 1971 Arthur Boyd and his wife Yvonne visited art dealer Frank McDonald at his New South Wales south coast property, 'Bundanon.'  Boyd was greatly inspired by the local landscape and spent weeks exploring the area and painting along the Shoalhaven River.  In 1973 Arthur and Yvonne Boyd purchased the nearby 'Riversdale' and later acquired 'Bundanon' itself from McDonald. 

Boyd's Shoalhaven paintings are the result of his obsession with and exploration of this particular landscape.  His many paintings of the river and bush-covered escarpment have entered the Australian psyche, and are some of the most recognisable images of the Australian landscape, 'a simple formula... that the average Australian can identify with immediately.'¹  But the Shoalhaven landscapes are in no way reductive - on the contrary, they represent an expansive opening up. As Janet McKenzie has observed; 'The natural beauty of the Shoalhaven area caused Boyd to marvel constantly.  His paintings are a celebration of the grandeur and wonder of Nature.  It is to Boyd's credit that a single landscape can inspire such diversity of work.  He gives us the impression that in life there are infinite possibilities, as long as we train ourselves to see.'²

As with much of Boyd's oeuvre, the present work draws together inspiration and iconography from previous paintings, often from decades earlier.  The boat ultimately derives from the wartime Lovers in a Boat (1944, National Gallery of Australia), though here it is significantly altered.  Unlike in Lovers in a Boat, Boyd does not here depict a scene of disturbance, where we are impinging upon the lovers' moment of privacy. Rather, as Boyd in old age contemplates the afterlife, the boat is transformed into Charon's ferry across the River Styx.  Similarly, the cave represents a combination of two previous motifs. The black lozenge of a hole in the rocks and its reflection was adopted from Tom Roberts's In a corner on the Macintyre (1895, National Gallery of Australia), and became one of the identifying markers of the Shoalhaven landscapes. Here it meets another borrowing, the cave from Paolo Uccello's St George and the Dragon (circa 1460, National Gallery, London) which also appears much earlier in Boyd's career: in Figure in a cave with a smoking book (1958, Private collection) and related works. 

The present work has much of the vibrancy, simplicity and lightness of touch of his earlier Bundanon paintings, while the themes are more sombre and reflective, anticipating the artist's very last painting, Waiting by Styx (circa 1997, collection Yvonne Boyd).

1. Dennis Savill, quoted in Darleen Bungay,  Arthur Boyd: A Life, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 2007, p. 559
2. Janet McKenzie, Arthur Boyd at Bundanon, Academy Press, London, 1994, p. 42