Footnotes

Arthur Boyd's visit to the Wimmera in the late 1940's would be a defining point for the young artist's oeuvre and would see him return to the subject sporadically over the following decades. He first visited the Wimmera 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. "He 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.

His 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 works 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 and exhaled to produce works of great stillness and beauty.

In the present work Boyd combines oil with tempera which enabled him to create a rich translucent impasto perfectly expressing the dry golden pastures typical of the region. Here he encapsulates his fascination with the Wimmera district and effortlessly introduces two familiar subjects to the desiccated landscape. The boulder like ram, centrally located in the composition peering over the dry thickets to the foreground where Boyd has delicately camouflaged what appears to be the figure of a sleeping bride.

Combining key iconographical elements with harmonic distinction, Bride in Wimmera Landscape is a unique example of Boyd's ingenious ability to weave a narrative applying reoccurring classic motifs.

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