Arthur Boyd

(1920-1999)

Rosebud Landscape, c.1937-39

Footnotes

PROVENANCE
Sir Keith Murdoch, Victoria
Private collection, Melbourne
Deutscher~Menzies, Australian and International Art, Sydney, 15 March 2006, lot 79
Private collection, Melbourne


In 1937 at the age of 17, Arthur Boyd moved to the family cottage at Rosebud on the Mornington Peninsula to live with his grandfather, the painter Arthur Merric Boyd Snr. During his three year tenure at Rosebud he painted numerous landscapes and beach scenes capturing his personal interpretation of the Mornington Peninsula.

'Most of the oil landscapes Arthur produced in this period, with their modernist blocking of areas in the composition to emphasize flat planes, toy with colour shapes in a way which tends towards abstraction, while delicacy of tone, impasto brushstrokes and sudden appreciation of detail introduce a lyricism reminiscent of the grandparents, or of Conder or Streeton. It is through the choice of subject-matter – quiet pastoral scenes and untroubled seascapes – and the creation of mood, that the Rosebud paintings are linked to the edenic vision of a former generation'.1

Rosebud Landscape is an exemplary example displaying his awareness of the Blue and Gold pastoral landscapes of his predecessors. Here he divides the composition in half emphasizing the presence of the Australian sky whilst applying lashes of thick paint and experimenting with the application of paint with a pallete knife similarly found in Rosebud Landscape with Haystacks, 1938 and Landscape with Grazing Sheep, 1937 (both in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra).

1. Patricia Dobrez and Peter Herbst, The Art of the Boyds, Bay Books, Sydney, 1990, p. 120