Landscape

Arthur Merric Bloomfield Boyd

Landscape by Arthur Merric Bloomfield Boyd

Details

Artist
Arthur Merric Bloomfield Boyd
Title
Landscape
Year
c.1948
Medium
oil on canvas on composition board
Size
 65.5 x 79 cm

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Further Information

In 1948-9, Arthur Boyd lived with his family at The Grange, Harkaway where his uncle, the novelist Martin Boyd had commissioned him to paint the entire dining room wall with a large mural. This remarkable work was followed by the Berwick and Wimmera landscapes, works which won Boyd wide recognition throughout Australia.

“The landscape of the Berwick district, about 30 miles east of Melbourne, is beautiful and varied... It is a landscape not infrequently referred to as ‘very English’, though it would not appear so to English eyes. With its undulating hills, its spinneys of gums, with its cultivated fields, grassy paddocks, small dams and iron windmills it is infinite, formed half wild, half pastoral, smaller and more densely inhabited than Australian landscape often is. It offers both intimacy and width of horizon. Arthur Boyd – I have already called him a born landscapist – responded to it with love and joy. During his stay at Harkaway and in the following years he painted some of his finest landscapes. Indeed it is then that he became one of the great Australian landscape painters. ...It is land in which man has lived, though it still retains, in the thickened seams of trees, its contiguity of lush and dry growth, traces of primeval character. The experience of Breugel’s art had, I believe, prepared Boyd for finding a ‘vocabulary of representation’ for a landscape both panoramic and intimate.”

Phillip, F., Arthur Boyd, Thames & Hudson, London, 1967, pp. 59-60