Arthur Boyd

(1920-1999)

Windmill - Wimmera Landscape

Footnotes

PROVENANCE
Wagner Art Gallery, Sydney (label attached verso)
The Cary Collection, Sydney

Arthur Boyd's visit to the Wimmera in the late 1940's would be a defining point for the young artist's career and would see him return to the subject sporadically over the course of his life. He first visited the district during the summer of 1948-49, when he travelled with his friend Jack Stephenson, a poet, to Horsham and painted the countryside near the Wimmera River. Then curator of Australian Art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales Barry Pearce observed, '(Boyd) discovered there the hint of something that had drawn other painters of his generation, a subject tentatively recorded by only a few artists of the nineteenth century and touched upon by even fewer: the empty spaces of the great interior."1

Boyd's Wimmera series were bookended by two defining groups of works, namely the teaming post war biblical scenes of the mid to late 1940s and his highly acclaimed Bride series, which commenced in 1955. The Wimmera works lie in stark contrast to the Old Testament paintings in terms of their empty space and restrained palette. It is as though Boyd had left the intensity of the immediate post war period behind him and took a restorative deep breath in the clear space of the North Western corner of Victoria. That period in the open, flat Wimmera plains produced works of great stillness and beauty.

1. Barry Pearce, Arthur Boyd: retrospective, Art Gallery of New South
Wales, Sydney, 1999, p. 20