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Lot 26
Arthur Boyd(1920-1999)Bride in Landscape, c.1981
26 August 2025, 18:00 AEST
SydneySold for AU$116,850 inc. premium
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Alex Clark
Head of Sale, Senior Specialist
Merryn Schriever
Managing Director, Australia
Arthur Boyd (1920-1999)
Bride in Landscape, c.1981
signed lower right: 'Arthur Boyd'
oil on board
91.5 x 121.0cm (36 x 47 5/8in).
signed lower right: 'Arthur Boyd'
oil on board
91.5 x 121.0cm (36 x 47 5/8in).
Footnotes
PROVENANCE
Mr Arthur Boyd
Lister Gallery, Perth
Private collection, Perth, acquired from the above c.1985
By 1981, Arthur Boyd had returned to Australia after years abroad and had begun re-engaging with the personal mythologies that had defined his earlier career. Painted more than two decades after his pivotal Bride series of the late 1950s, Bride in Landscape presents a more mystical and poetic iteration, fusing iconic motifs with expressive and dramatic terrain. In this later work, contemporary taboos surrounding interracial love are interwoven with the sublimity of the Australian landscape — its glowing sky cast above dense, shadowy foliage. Unlike the urgent, socially charged Bride paintings of the 1950s, this piece is introspective, shrouded in contemplative atmosphere.
Dramatically filling the composition, a luminous white bride lies semi-submerged in a dark dam. Her form and veil appear as if caught in a shaft of light, drawing the viewer's eye to the centre of the work. Yet her serene face stands in contrast to the drama of her body's posture, conveying a sense of psychological tension and exposing her to conflicting spiritual and cultural vulnerabilities. An ominous pair of crows introduces a mournful undertone. Around the bride, the tangled and enclosed bushland evokes a sense of isolation, though Boyd's rich, animated brushwork gestures towards the vitality and raw life of the wilderness. Whilst grounded in his familiar iconography, the work's contrasts and ambiguities conjure a compelling poetic force, as pale ochres and pastel tones merge into an atmosphere of haunting stillness and ethereal beauty.
With assured brushwork and emotional depth, Bride in Landscape reflects Boyd's mature command of paint and light. Here, he moves beyond overt narrative into a space of visual poetry, where body, land, and spirit converge in a liminal, luminous moment. The Bride figure, once a symbol of cultural guilt or erotic tension, has by this stage transcended into something more elegiac: a vessel of memory and trauma reimagined in timeless melancholy.