Narcissus with Three Clouds

ARTHUR BOYD (1920-1999)

Narcissus with Three Clouds

oil on canvas
107.0 x 92.0 cm; 114.0 x 99.0 cm (framed)
signed lower right: Arthur Boyd
bears inscription verso: Studio Assistant/ RAMSHOLT/ Hugh Webster

Provenance:
Savill Galleries, Sydney, c1999
Private collection, New South Wales

Estimate: $60000 - 80000

From his earliest years, Arthur Boyd’s art displayed a conscious referencing to a deep artistic heritage. The origins of this heritage lie in the prodigious Boyd dynasty of creative individuals numbered through several generations of painters, poets, potters, sculptors, novelists, architects, and musicians all of whom contributed to the family as well as providing a welcoming environment for outsiders. Arthur Boyd’s childhood home ‘Open Country’, in what is now the Melbourne suburb of Murrumbeena, was in the 1930s and 40s a highbrow commune where family and visitors were expected to share ideas and draw at the creative well.

In this fertile environment artistic freedom was encouraged, if not mandatory.  Arthur, who began painting when he left school aged fourteen, embodied the philosophy from his earliest years and continued to do so through the years leading up to World War II, his time in the armed services, and afterwards, as his career developed and he became a national figure, working, innovating, thinking and painting in Australia and later at his home in England. Open Country’s influence never waned, and to the work/processes that emerged there, were added experience and acquaintance through his long and successful career. The paintings he produced represent a cornucopia of concepts, motifs, symbols and allegories and influences that could become the subject of whole exhibitions, or a single painting.

Many of these highly complex allegories are curiously elusive in their meaning.  Boyd’s parallel creation of naturalistic landscapes inverts the dynamic with sometimes unexpected layers of significance.  In the continuum of Boyd’s career, themes might become dormant only to re-emerge later - and subject to stress-testing in the studio - combined with other themes, or re-presented in light of current events and new stimulants. Through this arcane mix Boyd worked to explore the nature of human creativity, the struggles of the artist, and particularly the conflicts of an ambitious Australian artist working far from home and projecting his work to the wider world.

The results of this struggle are rarely more pronounced than in what have become known as the Caged Painter series of the early 1970s, which became the basis of his 1973 exhibition at London’s Fischer Fine Art.(1) The intensity of these images and the task of untangling their iconography has the almost centrifugal effect of making them even more enigmatic.  The viewer spots, identifies and clings to a familiar motif as he then, moving on, becomes aware of further depths of meaning as the subject unfolds. Critic Sasha Grishin sums up Boyd’s process: ‘that while some immediate event or circumstance could serve as a catalyst for a painting, direct causationist links are difficult to determine and ultimately beside the point.’(2)

Oblique subjects contrast with the direct and fresh approach to the way these paintings are made; the actual application of paint and the rendering of a starkly lit, unmistakeably Australian landscape. Boyd’s virtuoso technique underpins each painting’s authority.

Narcissus with Three Clouds was painted some years later as a reprisal of the themes inherent in the Caged Artist series.  In the present work, we see a bleached landscape, overexposed under a pervasive sun. The earth has no pigment, and like the sky and the water conveys a somewhat sterile and desultory lifelessness, relieved only by a marginal tree and an unsteady and emaciated Narcissus figure - the artist, whose only stimulus is his own sketchy reflection in the water.

Several paintings from the Caged Artist series are now in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, as a result of Arthur and Yvonne Boyd’s gift to the gallery in 1975. 

Footnotes

1. Arthur Boyd: Recent Paintings [exhibition catalogue], Fischer Fine Art, London, 1973
2. Grishin, S., Australian Art: A History, The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2013, p.336

Tim Abdallah

Tim Abdallah is a fine art consultant with more than thirty-five years of experience working in auction houses, public museum and commercial art galleries in Australia, the UK, Germany and Italy.  He joined Lawsons Auctioneers in 2002 as Head of Art and until 2017 was Head of Art at Menzies.

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