PENLEIGH BOYD

Albany Fine Art, Melbourne
Private collection, Melbourne

Traditional heavy ornate gold frame. The work has been relined. UV inspection reveals no sign of flaring.
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The art of Penleigh Boyd represents the last great flowering of the Heidelberg tradition of the Australian Impressionist painters, first led by Tom Roberts, Frederick McCubbin and Arthur Streeton. Technique and national identity combined to present an image of a sunlit land of hope and promise, forged on the anvil of ANZAC and Australia's participation in the Great War. Boyd was badly gassed at Ypres. His generation, returning from such horrors, optimistically sought the ideal in the Australian landscape. Boyd continued his paintings in praise of the gum tree, not without some beneficial influence of Walter Withers before him, and the might and majesty of Hans Heysen's noble eucalypts around him. Australia was Arcadia. Nevertheless, the powerful images of Boyd's pre-war gums (he was awarded the 1914 Wynne Prize) gave way to a gentle nostalgia, a listless poeticism of things past, and the discovery of new beauty in the familiar - and what could be more so than the ubiquitous gum tree? Through his love of colour and its subtle harmonies, he poured into his art more than a touch of the notions of nineteenth century Aestheticism - ' 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,' - that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'¹

All is magnificently summarised in Ghost Gum at Kangaroo Flat in its associations of ghostly gum and prosaic flat, the contre-jour effect adding to the wistful mood. The practice of painting into the light reached its classical peak in the arcadian splendours of Claude Lorrain and his English-Australian disciple John Glover. The Impressionists used it differently. And Boyd's fellow plein airiste Elioth Gruner was the antipodean master of its tonal use to capture morning light and frosty days. In this subtle painting by Boyd we find that sense of transience that is associated with twilight, the ending of the day and the passing of time. The shadows lengthen and the shepherd and his sheep head homewards, redolent of Thomas Gray's Elegy in a Country Churchyard. Boyd's image is unmistakably Australian, of tranquillity unsurpassed.

1. Keats, J., Ode to a Grecian Urn, 1820, st. 5