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Arthur Boyd / Australia 1920–99 / Persecuted lovers ‑ study 1957–58 / Oil and tempera on composition board / 25.2 x 30.5cm / The Taylor Family Collection. Gift of Paul, Sue and Kate Taylor through the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation 2017. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © Arthur Boyd’s work reproduced with the permission of Bundanon Trust www.bundanon.com.au
Arthur BoydPersecuted lovers – Study 1957–1958
Not Currently on Display
Persecuted lovers – study 1957–58 is the finished oil and tempera study for Arthur Boyd’s iconic, large-scale Persecuted lovers 1957–58, held by the Art Gallery of South Australia and among the most highly regarded works of his ‘Love, Marriage and Death of a Half Caste’ series, more commonly known as the ‘Brides’.
Boyd produced a small group of studies for the ‘Brides’ series, which may reflect the complexity of the series in which the artist made observations about race, sex, violence and love that were difficult to express in 1950s Australia.1 These passionate and conflicting ideas are densely imagined by Boyd in dream-like threatening landscapes. Franz Philipp has argued that the studies were a way for Boyd to approach the series and to come to terms with the content.2 Persecuted lovers – study zeroes in on the figures with little attention paid to the surrounding landscape; Boyd condenses the scene, positioning the entangled lovers vulnerably with the menacing figure almost on top of them brandishing his gun at point blank range.
The ‘Brides’ series is one of the most significant narrative cycles in Australian Art history and this study contains a number of key iconographic elements and themes central to Boyd’s oeuvre such as the embracing figures, ill-fated love, sex, violence and death, persecution and redemption, set within the context of verdant landscapes. Aggressive and confrontational, the painting sits in active contrast to the gentler, more contemplative Sleeping bride 1957–58.
Endnotes:
1. Bonhams, ‘Arthur Boyd (1920-1999). Persecuted Lovers – Study 1957-58’ [auction catalogue essay], https://www.bonhams.com/auctions/23534/lot/63/.
2. Franz Philipp, Arthur Boyd, Thames & Hudson, London, 1967, p.145.
Arthur Boyd is arguably the most pictorially and creatively inventive of the twentieth-century Australian painters.
Born in 1920 in the Melbourne suburb of Murrumbeena, he entered into a family of painters, printmakers, potters and sculptors. From the age of 14 he lived at Rosebud on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula, with his grandfather, landscape painter Arthur Merric Boyd. It was here that he began to paint full-time. Boyd was conscripted into the army in 1941 and, though he did not actively serve in World War Two, the influence of war on his work is evident in the symbolism and atmosphere of psychological torment throughout his oeuvre.
During his travels through central Australia in 1953, Boyd was exposed to the disparity of living conditions between Indigenous and white Australians. In 1959 he moved to England, returning to Australia in 1968. His 1973–88 paintings were chosen as the first to be exhibited in the new Australian Pavilion at the 1988 Venice Biennale.