Flame Trees, Horse's Skull, Black River 1983

ARTHUR BOYD (1920-1999)

Flame Trees, Horse's Skull, Black River 1983

oil on linen
200.0 x 245.5 cm; 203.5 x 248.5 cm (framed)
signed lower right: Arthur Boyd

Provenance:
von Bertouch Galleries, New South Wales, c1986
Private collection
Sotheby's, Melbourne, 8 April 1990, lot 85 (as Pulpit Rock (Horses [sic] Skull)
Private collection, New South Wales

Exhibited:
Arthur Boyd: Recent Work, Fischer Fine Art, London, October - November 1983, cat.13 (label attached verso)
Arthur Boyd: The Bundanon Paintings, von Bertouch Galleries, New South Wales, 19 September - 12 October 1986 (as Pulpit Rock (Horses [sic] Skull)) (label attached verso)
Arthur Boyd: Retrospective, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 15 December 1993 - 6 March 1994; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 20 March - 23 May 1994; Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, 9 June - 21 August 1994; Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, 22 September - 20 November 1994, cat.131 (label attached verso)

Reference:
McKenzie, J., Arthur Boyd: Art & Life, Thames & Hudson, London, 2000, p.178 (illus. front cover, p.177)
Pearce, B., Arthur Boyd: Retrospective, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1993, p.146, cat.131 (illus.)

Estimate: $200000 - 300000

Result Hammer: $180000

The variation of this area with its great deep tones and high keys has an analogy with music. In the desert there is only one note, just one long singing note. In this landscape the tonal range - not tonal in the obvious sense of colour, but the actual fact of the horizon, which can vary from very high to low to infinite depending on your line of vision - makes it a greater challenge. It has a knife-edge clarity. Impressionism could never have been born here, but Wagner could easily have composed here.(1)

Coincidentally, a vinyl recording remaining on the player in Arthur Boyd’s studio at Bundanon after the artist’s death in 1999 was Wagner’s Das Rheingold. But who could have imagined far back in the 1930s, Boyd - a young innocent of diminutive stature riding his bicycle with bespoke trailer carrying painting materials around Mornington Peninsula - would eventually produce in his twilight years a landscape of such impressive scale and complex operatic symbolism as Flame Trees, Horse’s Skull, Black River?

Between the beginning and end of his career, signified in part by this impressive late masterpiece, transpired an incredible odyssey, woven over half a century through a peripatetic existence spanning Australia, England and Europe.

Galvanised from the start by a van Gogh postcard owned by his cousin Robin and influenced by the Dutchman’s Post-Impressionist ‘rhapsodies in praise of light’ as Kenneth Clark put it, Boyd began to render in early boyhood his own Antipodean version of ‘un soleil, une lumiere’ in rich slabs of glowing impasto, as taught by his mother Doris.(2) This was the genesis of one of the most astonishing careers in the history of Australian art.

However an indelible ingredient of his long odyssey was the landscape Boyd carried inside himself: not merely topographical, but a psychic space providing powerful theatre for embracing his perception of the triumphs and tragedies of the human condition. These he played out through deployment of Bible stories read to him as a child; narratives of ancient and modern literature, poetry and music; not to mention an emotional response to the evils of war and social iniquities which he was unafraid to portray with a much darker palette if necessary. Such elements were given cadence via the judicious placement of rocks, rivers, trees and exaggerated expanses of sand and bushland, as well as portraits and personae.

Moreover, never far beneath the surface of his worlds of earth, sky, water and mythologies, even under the radiant glare of Shoalhaven landscapes following his purchase of properties at Riversdale and Bundanon during the 1970s, lurked a strange, unfathomable eroticism that is yet to be fully explored.

There is a certain synergy in all this with the younger Brett Whiteley. Both artists were equally triggered in youth by the imagery of van Gogh. Both capable of rampant eroticism bursting out of their respective cornucopias. And both had father issues with subterranean ripples of melancholy that coursed through their hyperactive psyches; especially Arthur, with his beloved father Merric, a brilliant artist in his own right, whose epileptic, unhinged mental state never receded from his son’s longing for happiness.

In 1977 Brett wrote to Arthur from London expressing profound admiration of an exhibition of his Shoalhaven River paintings at Fischer Fine Art, so extensive in praise in fact, one feels Brett may have felt a kind of reach for healing in Arthur’s compositions.(3)

And of course both spent much time in Europe, emboldened by the great masters - Giotto, Piero della Francesca, Titian, Tintoretto and Rembrandt - to explore expansion of scale, if not via en série suites, through large individual easel paintings such as Flame Trees, Horse’s Skull, Black River, in which visionary preoccupations of a lifetime came home to roost. 

In the foreground of this painting is the remains of a horse entangled in barbed wire. The story goes it was named Flame, a family pet found trapped by the wire and which died during a flood.(4) The family buried its body under a flame tree, as Arthur recalled:

I unearthed the skull from the tree and put it in my studio. The coral trees were in bloom and I suppose the two ideas came together - the flowering tree and the dead horse. I put in the barbed wire because it was the cause of the horse’s death and it is also a reminder of the country and its cruelty.(5)

The red leaves glowing luminously against the dark mass of Pulpit Rock suggest a sense of resurrection, but the Dante-esque black river does not guarantee redemption according to Boyd’s theatre of pessimism. Indeed, the importance of Pulpit Rock’s brooding prominence as a silent witness of various moods through the ages was most succinctly articulated by Ursula Hoff:

Rising above a sharp bend in the river its silhouette is visible from many sides…  the rock has become a member of Boyd’s ‘cast’; it is his Rigi, his Mount Fujii, his Mont Sainte-Victoire.(6) 

And what of the mysterious, miniaturised presence of a mother and child in the middle distance, which seems to imply that we are each and every one so ultimately insignificant? Or perhaps it is simply a self-portrait of the artist as a baby, a traveller through time in Boyd’s imagination, an innocent observer from the very beginning, but still doomed to be engulfed by the grand, beautifully indifferent spaces of time and seasons that surrounded and held him captive.

Footnotes

1. Arthur Boyd, from the transcript of an interview with the author in 1993, pp.27-28
2. Clark, K., Landscape into Art, Penguin Books, London, revised edition, 1961, p.120
3. Letter from Brett Whiteley to Arthur Boyd, 1977, State Library of New South Wales collection, Sydney
4. Hoff., U., The Art of Arthur Boyd, André Deutsch, London, 1986, pp.67-68
5. McGrath, S., The Artist and the River: Arthur Boyd and the Shoalhaven, Bay Books, Sydney, 1982, p.240
6. Hoff, U., op. cit., p.78

Barry Pearce AM

Barry Pearce AM is Emeritus Curator of Australian Art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. He was the curator of Arthur Boyd’s touring retrospective in 1993-94 and author of the related publication, Arthur Boyd: Retrospective.    

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