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• Auction House:
  Mossgreen
• Sale Name:
  Fine Australian Art
• Sale Date:
  28 Oct 2014 ~ 6.30pm
• Lot #:
  29
• Lot Description:
  Arthur Merric Bloomfield Boyd
  (1920-1999)
  The Moored Boat 1939
  oil on canvas on board
  34.5 x 46 cm
  signed and dated 'Arthur M Boyd 39' lower right
• Provenance:
  From The collection of the late Alan Boxer
• Notes:
  This is a very rare painting by Arthur Boyd at the approximate age of nineteen. It was most likely painted at Rosebud on the Mornington Peninsula, where the young Boyd would go to stay with his kindly grandfather Arthur Merric Boyd (1862-1940), who always nurtured his budding talents. Boyd showed early aptitude in painting and won his first art award at the age of thirteen at Murrumbeena State School in 1933 and repeated his success in the following year. Soon after, he took to going on painting trips along Melbourne's Yarra River with Wilfred McCulloch and Jo Sweatman and various Mornington beachside spots with his grandfather, with whom he lived for three years. Boyd started selling paintings as early as 1937 and he held his first solo exhibition, at the age of seventeen, at Westminster Gallery in Little Collins Street in Melbourne. In 1939, the year of the present painting, he viewed the infamous Herald Exhibition of French and British Contemporary Art, where he much admired the work of the German Expressionist artist Franz Marc (1880-1916) and there is something of a Marc-like quality in the present painting and its bold colouristic effects. Boyd's emergent talent may be discerned in the raw and already impassioned paintwork of this very early work. He is recorded as having the use of a boat for exploring the shoreline at Rosebud and it is more than likely that the present painting of a moored boat was occasioned by one of these trips. The painting has ample evidence of the use of the palette knife and the work's brushwork is more daubed than applied. Essentially, Boyd was a haptic artist who tended to paint according to feeling as though guided by an emotional response to the subject matter. The haptic artist is characteristically uncommunicative and often quite unaware of the inner source and any purpose of his or her art. Furthermore, the haptic artist's concerns are those of the body-self wherein all experiences place the self in value relationship to the outside world. In other words, to the haptic artist the world is made up of felt experiences rather than observed occurrences. In these senses, Boyd generally may be seen as a modern haptic artist in that he does not want to get it right, he wants to feel right about it. The present painting is a significant and embryonic instance of this type of felt response.
• Estimate:
  A$18,000 - 25,000
• 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.