Important Australian Art Including Works from the Qantas Collection

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Lot 57
  • 57

PENLEIGH BOYD

Estimate
120,000 - 180,000 AUD
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Description

  • Penleigh Boyd
  • THE BOYD HOMESTEAD AT YARRA GLEN
  • Signed and dated 1910 lower right
  • Oil on canvas
  • 80 by 131 cm
  • Probably in the artist's one-man show, The Guildhall, Melbourne, 1910 (catalogue untraced)

Provenance

The Estates of Mr and Mrs Maurice G. Sloman
Fine Australian and International Paintings, Sotheby's, Melbourne, 2 May 2000, lot 85
Private collection, Melbourne; purchased from the above

Exhibited

Penleigh Boyd 1890-1923, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, Mornington, 11 June - 30 July 2000

Literature

Rodney James et al., Penleigh Boyd 1890-1923, Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, Mornington, 2000, p. 27

Catalogue Note

Theodore Penleigh Boyd was among the most precociously talented Australian artists of his generation, the third son of Arthur Merric Boyd and Emma Minnie, the late Arthur Boyd's grandparents, he enrolled at Melbourne's National Gallery School under Bernard Hall and McCubbin in 1905 – when he was fifteen. His parents purchased the dairy farm depicted in the present painting in 1906, naming it 'Tralee', and here Penleigh Boyd spent many weekends and holidays. 'Sketching for us was as normal an activity as breathing', wrote his younger brother Martin. 1 From 1908 Penleigh exhibited with the Victorian Artists' Society and in 1910 held his first one-man show. Unfortunately we have been unable to locate a catalogue of that exhibition but it is likely that a painting as important as The Boyd Homestead at Yarra Glen would have been included.

As Geoffrey Searle has observed, Penleigh Boyd learned from Frederick McCubbin at the Gallery more about the principlas of plein-air painting and the Heidelberg tradition than about drawing. 2 The influence of Walter Withers is evident: especially of Withers's Tranquil Winter, 1895 (National Gallery of Victoria) which Boyd would have known well and which McCubbin especially admired for its 'truthfulness and poetry'. 3 The cattle drinking, the majestic gums and the path zig-zagging up the hill to a distant homestead are all reminiscent of Withers's earlier composition. But Boyd has also learned from Heysen and Streeton. His low viewpoint is dramatic and his brushwork is broad and bold in many passages.

Penleigh Boyd travelled to Europe in 1911; and there met and married fellow artist Edith Anderson (Phillips Fox's favorite model at that time). On their return to Melbourne in 1913, the couple settled here at Tralee. They moved to Warrandyte in 1914 but Penleigh enlisted in AIF three years later and moved his family to Sydney after the First World War. Tragically, he was killed in a car accident at the age of only thirty-three.   

1. Serle, G., Robin Boyd, a life, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1996, p. 6.
2. Op. cit., p. 7.
3. MacDonald, J. S., The Art of Frederick McCubbin, Lothian Press, Melbourne, 1916, p. 87.