Footnotes

PROVENANCE
Fischer Fine Art, London
Rex Irwin Art Dealer, Sydney, as Nude with Bird (label attached verso)
The Taffs Art Collection, Sydney
Savill Galleries, Sydney
The Collection of the Late Richard Green, Sydney

The proceeds from the sale of this work will go to support the work of Medecins sans Frontieres

Painted on composition board with Swedish manufacturing stamps, this work was possibly painted during Arthur Boyd's period in England. Intended to only last a few months, Boyd's time in the United Kingdom was extended indefinitely with the majority spent in Suffolk.

The trip was initially supported by Australian dealer Tam Purves of Australian Galleries, though a highly successful show of paintings with Zwemmer Gallery in July-August of 1960 established Boyd in the English market amongst collectors. By 1962, Boyd was the subject of a retrospective exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery whose scope was significant. Over 151 paintings, eight large drawings and sixteen ceramic 'paintings' were included and the show was enthusiastically embraced by critics and collectors.

Like Lovers in a Landscape, 1961, which 'reveals the couple in close embrace in spite of the threatening black ram in the centre of the landscape, while a sharp-beaked bird plucks at the bride's elongated dress' 1, here also is the couple partially embedded in a tangled and disordered forest. Boyd's figures from this period are often submerged or mid-transformation; they hover in their mythological landscapes or emerge changed from dark waters.

As observed by Franz Philipp in 1967, 'She, the recumbent nude, is Boyd's bella disornata, red-haired (on head and pubes as his Venuses often are) 2' whilst 'he' is barely more than an eye and curl of dark hair. Like many of Boyd's works from the 1960s, the lovers have fused. They are locked together; joined by the line of the mouth and a hand which closes the embrace. Cascading down the gully runs the same creek as in Lovers in a Landscape, running under, or through, our 'joined figure'.

Merryn Schriever

1. Janet McKenzie, Arthur Boyd: Art & Life, Thames and Hudson, London, 2000, p. 107
2. Franz Philipp, Arthur Boyd, Thames and Hudson, London, 1967, p. 96