PENLEIGH BOYD

Penleigh Boyd had a gifted inclination for painting landscapes that featured stretches of water, of rivers, as in this painting, and the sea, especially Melbourne's River Yarra and the beach at Portsea. Fine examples are Bridge and Wattle at Warrandyte, 1914 in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, and Portsea, 1920 in the Benalla Art Gallery. Occasionally he indulged in extravaganzas of golden wattles blossoming beside the tranquil surface of the Yarra, as in Spring Fantasy, 1919 in the Castlemaine Art Gallery and Historical Museum. A member of the gifted Boyd family of artists, son of the painters Emma Minnie and Arthur Merric Boyd, the precocious Penleigh was blessed with good looks and a charming manner, winning prizes at the National Gallery Art School and the Wynne Prize for landscape painting in 1914. Stylistically, his art followed, perhaps a little nostalgically, the traditions established by the Australian impressionist artists, Arthur Streeton and Walter Withers, his landscapes bathed in the atmospheric freshness one associates with painting en plein air.

Streeton of course, had most famously painted the Hawkesbury River in 1896 – In The purple noon's transparent might (National Gallery of Victoria). A lover of beauty in nature, Penleigh Boyd’s gentle visions of an Australian arcady were, to some extent, a creative retreat from the horror of his experiences in France during the First World War. His interest in quietly lyrical moods captured in the subtlety of his colours, resulted in naturalistic landscapes of the familiar, redolent with a post-war nationalism, almost timeless, where, as in Hawkesbury River, calm dwells in azure beauty.