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• Auction House:
  Mossgreen
• Sale Name:
  The Peter Elliott Collection
• Sale Date:
  30 Aug 2015 ~ 6pm - Part 1 (Lots 1 - 193)
  31 Aug 2015 ~ 11am - Part 2 (Lots 194 - 340)
  31 Aug 2015 ~ 2pm - Part 3 (Lots 341 - 511)
  01 Sep 2015 ~ 10.30am - Part 4 (Lots 512 - 754) and 2pm - Part 5 (Lots 755 - 1013)
• Lot #:
  17
• Lot Description:
  Arthur Merric Bloomfield Boyd
  (1920-1999)
  The Grampians 1950
  oil and tempera on board
  100 x 121 cm
  signed lower right: Arthur Boyd
• Provenance:
  Johnstone Gallery, Brisbane
• Exhibited:
  Arthur Boyd Retrospective, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 12 December 1993 - 6 March 1994, touring National Gallery of Australia, Tasmania Museum and Art Gallery, Art Gallery of Western Australia, cat. no. 65; Up Close and Personal: Works from the Collection of Dr Peter Elliott AM, S.H Ervin Gallery, Sydney, August-September 2011; Masterpieces from the Peter Elliott Collection - curated by Lou Klepac, Maitland Regional Art Gallery, 6 December 2013 - 7 February 2014, Orange Regional Art Gallery,
• References:
  Barry Pearce, Art Gallery, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1993, p. 82, illus. pl. 65; Gavin Fry, The Peter Elliott Collection of Australian Art, The Beagle Press 2013, p. 76, cat. no. 59
• Notes:
  Arthur’s Boyd’s The Grampians of 1950 was created in response to the insights gained during a trip in 1949 to the Wimmera region in Victoria. Boyd together with his wife Yvonne and their children were invited to the area by the poet Jack Stevenson and his wife Betty to stay with them in Horsham, about 300 kilometres north-west of Melbourne. Boyd was entranced by the largely featureless landscape and by the prominent Grampians mountain range that borders the Wimmera. It seemed to him to typify something distinctly Australian – open, unpopulated and hard-won farming all in an area that was both arid and lush.  Even the skies looked vaster than anything he had seen in the leafy Melbourne suburb of Murrumbeena and rural Harkaway near the small township of Berwick. If there is a unifying characteristic feature to Boyd’s painting of the area it lies in the equal pictorial attention he gave to both sky and land. Boyd’s The Grampians of 1950 is characteristic of the paintings that he created during this period and his later trips to the area. The present painting is almost divided into two equal zones that are split between land and sky. At first, the depicted scene seems covered by a yellow tint as though all is suffused by sunset; however, there are no long shadows, no glow and no harshly contrasted light and shade effects. Closer inspection reveals that the scene is caught in a haze of dust and that Boyd has attempted to render the odd contrasts that caught his initial attention. The land is arid and the hills are almost bare on their west side and yet lush on the east. The eerily empty arable field of alluvial soil supports vegetation of a sort, but it is sparse and almost as dry as the parched waterhole in the lower centre foreground.   Boyd’s The Grampians is a vast new landscape that has taken him into a new stylistic schema and a technically different way of painting. This is not the verdant lushness of his Harkaway series, but something new that presages his later Central Australian desert paintings The young Boyd was just on thirty when created his early The Grampians of 1950 – what one sees in this significant work is the emergence of a new freedom and an important thematic category. 
• Estimate:
  A$60,000 - 90,000
• Realised Price:
  *****
  

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• Category:
  Art

This Sale has been held and this item is no longer available. Details are provided for information purposes only.