ARTHUR BOYD

Mr G.E. Rodan, Sydney
The Holmes à Court Collection, Heytesbury, Perth
Agapitos Wilson Collection, Sydney; purchased from the above
Private collection, Sydney; purchased from the above in 2000

Peter Bray Gallery, Melbourne, 1953, cat. 19 as 'The Hunter 3'
Macquarie Galleries, Sydney, possibly Christmas 1970 
On loan to the Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, July 2001 - July 2002

Arthur Boyd Retrospective, Whitechapel Gallery, London, 1962, plate V, not exhibited
Franz Philipp, Arthur Boyd, Thames & Hudson, London, 1967, cat. II.38, illus. no. 25, p.40

Minor drying cracks to central figures. Overall very good condition. This work is not lined and the stretcher is original.
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At the beginning of the Second World War, Arthur Boyd became acquainted with a circle of migrant artists, scholars and thinkers who had fled Nazi-occupied Europe.  He was embraced by an intellectual and thought provoking environment and began to attend occasional lectures at the University of Melbourne in psychology and philosophy.  He read Dostoyevsky, looked at reproductions of paintings by the Old Masters and German Expressionists and started to paint images of terror and evil in the streets of war-time Melbourne.

In March 1941 Boyd was conscripted into the army and for the next three years his world was dominated by army experiences. In late 1942 he was reprimanded by his superior officers for painting anti-war images and demoted from the cartographic section to driving transports.  'This period represents an immensely important phase in his artistic development; the work produced at this time includes his boldest achievements, which remain central to his work.  Essentially, the paintings are occult allusions to human conflict.¹  Boyd disliked army life, especially the lack of privacy, feeling his every move was watched.

Franz Philipp called 1944 Boyd's annus mirabilis, in which he rediscovered the Australian landscape in a new guise: the deep-gullied mountain bushland of Victoria.  The hunter III (The lost hunter) is part of his important series on the theme of the hunter (The hunter II is in the Art Gallery of New South Wales).  Here it is the use of blacks and browns which startle one at first.  The thick scumbling of black paint (which sometimes is so dense it seems to come straight from the tube) and the prevailing feeling of malevolence, creates a dark vision of mythological proportions.  This landscape is an evocation of Marcus Clarke's 'weird melancholy... a fantastic land of monstrosities...The trunks of the trees are highlighted by white, transforming them into ghost-like sentinels'.²  In this claustrophobic tangle of dark twisted bush lies an outstretched figure, his helpless body prostrate on the ground, his feet without shoes.  He is the Outsider, the Persecuted, both the Hunter and the Hunted.  He is 'the Australian couterpart of the wild man of the woods of European folklore'³, an ambiguous character who is both innocent and strange.  He is secretly watched by two figures in blue uniforms, one of whom is astride a rearing horse.  The second and more sinister figure appears to be wearing a blue hat or helmet, has left his horse to graze nearby while he creeps silently through the bushes, his face a groteseque mask of evil.  Even the birds seem ominous.

In the midst of all this darkness, Boyd has painted the main figure in a tunic of brilliant red to which our eye is drawn repeatedly.  Some years earlier, in 1937, Boyd had painted Self portrait in red shirt and later used the motif of a red tunic in his Biblical series in 1945 to signify Moses, the Angel and other scriptural heroes.  Thus the character of the Hunter/Hunted metamorphoses into the artist and back again.  It is a continuous process in Boyd's iconography during which 'representation always becomes interpretation, something beyond actuality.'⁴

1.  Grazia Gunn, Arthur Boyd: Seven Persistent Images, Australian National Gallery, Canberra, 1985, p. 35
2. ibid p. 40
3. ibid
4. ibid