Jinker on the Sandbank, Shoalhaven 1986

ARTHUR BOYD (1920-1999)

Jinker on the Sandbank, Shoalhaven 1986

oil on canvas
121.5 x 151.5 cm; 136.0 x 166.0 cm (framed)
signed lower right: Arthur Boyd

Provenance:
Wagner Art Gallery, Sydney
Private collection, Sydney
Menzies, Melbourne, 14 September 2011, lot 31
Private collection, Melbourne
Menzies, Sydney, 27 June 2013, lot 53
Private collection, Melbourne
Private collection, Melbourne

Exhibited:
Arthur Boyd, Wagner Art Gallery, New York, 1987

Estimate: $120000 - 180000

Result Hammer: $120000

Many Australian artists have taken the landscape and stamped it with their own image … Arthur Boyd’s Shoalhaven pictures give us a new depth of understanding of landscape, a new set of forms and vistas to look upon … Each work is tied to a specific place that has been watched and observed hour after hour until it becomes absorbed and relived in paint.(1) 

Arthur Boyd first visited the Shoalhaven region of New South Wales in the summer of 1971-2, when art dealer Frank McDonald invited the artist and his wife Yvonne to Bundanon, an old grazing property on the Shoalhaven River.  The Boyds were immediately captivated by the Shoalhaven’s unspoiled beauty.  As Arthur recalled, ‘it was such a marvellous experience. The actual scale of the place was so big. In Victoria it’s all so much smaller … it hasn’t got this kind of light, this brilliance, the shadows around here when the sun is in the middle of the day.’(2) By the end of that decade, the Boyds had acquired two properties in the Shoalhaven: Riversdale, purchased in 1973; and Bundanon itself, which McDonald had tendered for sale in 1978. 

Arthur Boyd’s move to the Shoalhaven, which followed two decades in London and rural England, would engender a profound shift in the character of his art.  Boyd’s immersion in this new landscape prompted a ‘return to painting from nature’,(3) away from the myth-laden figuration that had dominated his art in the 1960s. The influences of Rembrandt, Titian and Bruegel receded, as Boyd turned instead to the nineteenth-century Australian landscapes of Tom Roberts, Eugene von Guérard and William Charles Piguenit for inspiration.(4)     

Many of Boyd’s paintings from this time reflect extremes – from the inspiring grandeur of the untamed landscape to its ever-present, destructive qualities; the damage from a flood juxtaposed with the searing beauty of the moment, in a duality of opposites.  As Sandra McGrath observes:

The River is, of course, the most compelling image in many of these paintings from this period. Boyd has captured it in all its moods, quiet as floods begin to recede; ugly brown as it swells with water; dark, calm and green in summer when the land is parched; glowing pink at sunset.(5)

Boyd’s motif of the horse and cart, or jinker, began to appear in various guises in his art from the late 1960s. The jinker paintings of the mid-1970s were often imbued with dark undertones - a result, perhaps, of the Great Flood of 1974, which would have profoundly impacted on Boyd’s representations of the Shoalhaven area at the time. Conversely, in the present work, which was painted over a decade later in 1986, one senses great positivity and a certain intimacy in the treatment of the subject. The horse and trap rider are propelled along a wedge of sand on the river’s edge, amid the reflective stillness of the Shoalhaven at twilight.  The carefully nuanced pinks and purples of Boyd’s palette create an inviting, romantic ambience with the sky lit only by the fading sun and a slim crescent moon. 

Boyd zealously sought to protect the Shoalhaven region from what he saw as malign human interference.  In August 1981, the artist wrote to the New South Wales Government to express his opposition to a proposed sand mine at Wogamia, a neighbouring property on the Shoalhaven River, asserting that the development ‘would pollute the air and river to an unacceptable degree, destroy the peace of the area, detract from its natural beauty and depreciate Bundanon’s unique contribution to the region.’6  Arthur and Yvonne Boyd’s subsequent decision in 1993 to gift Bundanon and Riversdale to the Commonwealth was motivated in large part by their desire to preserve the properties’ unique natural environment and built heritage. 

Jinker on the Sandbank, Shoalhaven is a singular example of Boyd’s Shoalhaven landscapes. It is a highly lyrical and expertly composed painting which captures the meditative beauty of a place he knew and loved.     

Footnotes

1. McGrath, S., The Artist & The River: Arthur Boyd and the Shoalhaven, Bay Books, Sydney, 1982, p.16
2. Arthur Boyd, quoted in Arthur Boyd: Retrospective, The Beagle Press in association with the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1993, p.27
3. Hoff, U., The Art of Arthur Boyd, André Deutsch Limited, London, 1986, p.71
4. Ibid., p.71
5. McGrath, S., op. cit., p.78
6. Ibid., p.65

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