Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

RETURNING TO ARCADIA Arthur Boyd Berwick landscape Barry Pearce / % rcadian landscapes have been an / % integral part of the ambiguity . 4 - with which Arthur Boyd has viewed the human condition throughout all of his life as an artist. These were amongst the first subjects he painted, wandering the fields and beaches of the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria, embracing the pastoral genre of his grandfather, Arthur Merric Boyd, and of the Australian impressionists. However, following the end of the 1930s, when the world was at war, Boyd left the innocent surroundings of his adolescence to live in inner city Melbourne, where he experienced grimmer realities. Quite suddenly, his art began to reflect a more emotionally disruptive terrain, climaxing after the war with disturbing crucifixion scenes set on the shores of Port Philip Bay. Apattern was thus established which would continue for six decades, marked by an oscillation between extreme states of mood; darkness vying with light, anger with calm, desolation with joy. To some extent the darker states have been a response to real events — such as wars of attrition, social alienation, or the persecution of one culture by another — and certainly the first impact on Boyd in London in 1960 of great master paintings reinforced his tendency towards gravitas. But perhaps most of all, they have been the result of anxieties embedded early into the artist's psyche, and against which his more joyous, bucolic landscapes have always been an essential counterpoint. Within this continuous oscillation of mood, Boyd's first return to Arcadia took place in the late 1940s, when he produced a series of paintings around the Berwick area, part of the Peninsula on the railway line about fifty kilometres east of Melbourne, and not far from his parents' home in Murrumbeena. The artist lived briefly at Harkaway in The Grange, the old à Beckett house of his uncle Martin who had commissioned him to execute a series of frescoes for the dining room.1In 1948 Martin had come back to Melbourne after an absence abroad of twenty-seven years. He had established himself as a successful writer in England and decided it was time to return to the country where he had spent the first two decades of his life. barked by soldier-settlers clearing land for agriculture and grazing pasture. These trees, with their sticky white branches, are not typical of an English pastoral. They prickle the mind in a manner described by D. H. Lawrence, and at the same time are a symbolic reminder that Boyd's emotional turbulence was never far beneath the surface.2In a closely related painting, ÄBeckett Road, Harkaway 1949 (Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery), the Australian sense is a little more obvious: although heavy clouds scud the horizon, straw- coloured grasses indicate a landscape on the cusp of a warm Antipodean summer. Facing page Arthur Boyd Australia b.1920 Berwick landscape 1948 Tempera on composition board 69.6 X 87.4cm Purchased 1977 Queensland Art Gallery Berwick landscape 1948 (Queensland Art Gallery) is one of Arthur Boyd's most beautiful paintings of this period. In some ways, the work epitomises the geographic schizophrenia that haunted almost the entire Boyd family, and no more so than Martin Boyd and his nephew Arthur (who was later to divide his time regularly between England and Australia). The gentle hills that rise on the plain of the Berwick district between Port Phillip Bay and the Dandenong Ranges as shown in this painting, and which could be seen in broad expanse from The Grange, have often been referred to for their 'Englishness'. Here the deep verdant colour reinforces such an observation, especially with the hermetic atmosphere of farmhouses, cows, ploughed fields, and in the centre a small quarry, possibly for the excavating of clay for domestic purposes, or as topsoil for farming. Yet this image does not entirely exclude the sense that it is Australian, with its broad canopy of sky over the smooth forms of an ancient country and dead, dry trees ring­ ln one of his later novels, The Cardboard Crown, published in 1952, Martin Boyd set his fictional Westhill on the actual elevated plateau of The Grange, describing: ... magnificent views to the north across the valley to the ranges, to the west across twenty miles of plain to the bay, an expanse of pale gold in the evening light, beyond which could be seen the delicate purple peaks of the You Yang mountains .3 Yet elsewhere he underlined the uncomfortable Australianness of it all: I felt the country to be large and frightening with so much dead timber, with snakes and scorpions, with magpies which snapped their beaks like a pistol shot close to one's ear when they were hatching their young. Sometimes in the summer to go out of doors was like entering a vast scorching oven, and I felt my head would burst .4 In the writer's vision, the cosiness emanated by Berwick landscape belies another reality. Not least, however, Berwick landscape recalls Arthur Boyd's enthusiasm for the 206 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965