ARTHUR BOYD

The artist
S.A. Heneage, Esq., Surrey, United Kingdom by 1964
Kym Bonython by 1965
Sydney County Council
Corporate collection, Sydney

Arthur Boyd: retrospective exhibition, Whitechapel Gallery, London, June - July 1962, cat. 124 (illus. pl. XXXVII)
Arthur Boyd: retrospective exhibition of paintings 1936 - 62, Museum of Modern Art and Design of Australia, Melbourne, 5 - 28 May 1964, cat. 55
Arthur Boyd Retrospective; Adelaide Festival of the Arts, Special Exhibitions of the National Gallery of South Australia, 1964, cat. 51 (label on the reverse)

Franz Philipp, Arthur Boyd, Thames and Hudson, London, 1967, p. 263, cat. 55
James Mollison, 'Arthur Boyd', Art and Australia, vol. 3, no. 2, September 1965, illus. p. 116
Figure crossing a river by Arthur Boyd (pamphlet), Sydney County Council, Sydney, n.d.

Overall good, original condition. No visable defects or evidence of retouchings.
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A thinly disguised Arthur Boyd appears at the beginning of his uncle Martin's novel The Cardboard Crown.  Martin Boyd presents himself in the role of the narrator Guy Langton, and Arthur becomes Guy's nephew Julian.  Early in the book, Martin-Guy describes Arthur-Julian's painting as 'traditional, rooted in tradition, Catholic, it breathes in the inescapable sorrow of the human race', and as presenting 'not only sunlight and dreamy distances, but dark forces lurking in the trees.'¹ While the particular narrative of the present work is unidentifiable, it certainly has that biblical-moral tone that Martin noted as so characteristic of Arthur's work. 

Titled simply Figure crossing a river, it dates from the early 1960s, and so carries echoes of the artist's contemporary tragic, lonely brides and doomed Actaeon-hunters, and even premonitions of the Romeo and Juliet and St Francis series.  There are also perhaps suggestions of St John the Baptist in the Jordan, or St Christopher and his ford, with the river crossing connoting cleansing, death and transformation. 

Bounding towards the central figure is a red-eyed black dog, a familiar Boyd motif, the dark beast of the unconscious who begins as the family pet and a St Kilda mongrel before becoming a curly-horned ram and then a Piero de Cosimo-inspired hang-dog or a Titianesque man-stag.  In this picture it is unclear whether the dog is running up to welcome or to attack, unclear whether the figure's hand is outstretched in blessing or self-defence.  Equally ambiguous is the white cockatoo sweeping down from above.  Originally a naturalistic spirit of place in Boyd's Wimmera series, here the cocky has become a symbolic creature: avenging angel or haunting spectre, white bird of peace or raucous emblem of colonial history. 

Around this triad stretches a dense shadowed forest of smoky grey paint, a dynamic, even turbulent field brushed and knifed and fingered with flicks and drags and squiggles.  The picture is a dark, foreboding stormscape, illuminated by lightning-flashes of flake white on water and leaves and clouds, and only relieved by the sky-blue, Virgin-blue, Virgil-blue tunic of the central figure. 

At the time this work was painted, Boyd was at the height of his early London fame.  A contemporary satirical piece in the Evening Standard on 'the most with-it man in town' describes how 'Timothy Babchuck-jjones' is always changing his address and even his furniture to accommodate the latest fashion.  The article continues: 'His pictures change too. He has just flogged his Friso ten Holts to buy Arthur Boyds.'²  'Babchuck-jjones' was only reflecting a widespread attitude.  The recent paintings included in Boyd's 1962 Whitechapel exhibition were indeed particularly warmly received by the British critics.  Terence Mullaly noted that 'in [his] latest works, something new has happened.  He has become less concerned with the content of each picture, more with the actual handling of the paint.  These new paintings... are fascinating. The colour is lovely and the strange creatures in them compelling...' ³  The Times critic was similarly impressed by Boyd's technique; '... he paints with utter conviction, with characteristic twirling flicks of the brush which lend a nervous passion to the rich impressionistic quality of his paint.'   The Times also commented on the work's 'intensely romantic quality', its 'dark sorrow... the luxurious [sic] yet crumbling forests, the gullies that run through them, the sunsets and shadowed pools, provide settings as expressive of a state of mind as the forests of Grünewald, in which the presence of watching eyes intensifies feelings of mingled innocence, loneliness and guilty embodied in the phantom figures.  Mr Boyd here creates a world and an iconography of his own which is as moving as it is personal.' ⁴

Included in both the London and Melbourne retrospectives of 1962 and 1964, Figure Crossing the River is an important work, exemplary both of the 'inescapable sorrows and dark forces' with which Boyd wrestled all his life, and of the 'lovely colour' and 'rich impressionistic' paint in which he presented his psychomachia, his struggle of the soul.

1. Martin Boyd, The Cardboard Crown, E.P. Dutton & Co., New York, 1953, p. 20
2. 'Jack Ruff', 'The most with-it man in town', The Evening Standard, 30 June 1962, p. 9
3. Terence Mullaly, 'Boyd show a rare chance to trace artist's style', The Daily Telegraph, London, 13 July 1962, p. 15
4. The Times, London, 28 June 1962, p. 16