Footnotes

PROVENANCE
Mr David Hughes, London
The David Levine Collection, Melbourne
Savill Galleries, Sydney
The Collection of the Late Richard Green, Sydney

LITERATURE
David Levine, A Treasury of Australian Art from the David Levine Collection, Rigby, Adelaide, 1981, p. 142 (illus.)

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

Arthur Boyd, like other major Australian artists of his generation returned to major themes throughout his careers: one thinks of Nolan and Kelly or Williams and the You Yangs. 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.

Boyd's landscapes painted from these regions were widely well-received, possibly because their straw-like palette which was similar to that of the popular Heidelberg School. Dry Dam, Wimmera is most likely Boyd's rendering of a scene from central western Victoria; the bone-dry dam distressed from the peak of summer is characteristic of the type of landscape Boyd encountered on his numerous visits. Franz Philipp describes the landscape which Boyd came to know so well, "dry, semi-arid, sheep and wheat country, turning yellow and sun-parched in summer, with patches of burnt-off stubble or weed...he invariably includes some sign of life, human or animal: a ramshackle shed, scattered thin, dusty sheep, a hunter followed by his slow, thirsty dog, some distant houses or even only a bird..."2

Arthur Boyd consistently alternated between naturalistic and imaginative phases in his work; he would often return to the landscape genre after an exhaustive period of creative output. There is a certain sense of serenity present in Boyd's depictions of the landscape, particularly after viewing his chaotic, figurative works painted from the imagination, such as Nebuchadnezzar or his Biblical subjects. The palette Boyd chose for many of his landscape paintings is optimistic when compared to the dark tones of his Bride series. Clearly, Boyd found his local surroundings to be uplifting and inspiring; this sentiment is felt in the beautiful renderings of the countryside that he returned to paint over and again throughout his long and distinguished career.

Alex Clark

1 Barry Pearce, Arthur Boyd: retrospective, Art Gallery of New South
Wales, The Beagle Press, 1999, p. 20
2 Franz Philipp, Arthur Boyd, Thames and Hudson, London, 1967, p. 62