Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

Left Arthur Boyd Gaffney's Creek 1948 Oil on canvas on composition board 83 X 107.5cm Purchased 1977 Queensland Art Gallery Arthur Boyd A 1 Beckett Road, Harkaway 1949 Oil, tempera on composition board 45.7 X 55.9cm Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart Right Arthur Boyd Baptism C.1947 Earthenware, polychrome enamel on white clay tile with clear glaze 43x41x 2.5cm Purchased 1954 Queensland Art Gallery reproductions of old masters which he and John Perceval perused in books with feverish excitement in the Swanston Street Library during the war. The luminosity of the dead trees and jewel-like settings of brown and blue against deep green in Boyd's painting evoke Uccello's dazzling heraldry of details set against the Tuscan fields, or maybe the tiny worlds seen through windows behind Flemish Madonnas. Boyd's appetite for the works of old masters was so intense, there are any number of possible speculations: in his 1567 monograph on Boyd, Franz Philipp even suggests an affinity between this kind of landscape and Constable.5But, above all, Berwick landscape summons Boyd's declared love of the great Flemish artist Pieter Brueghel, whose narratives were made radiant through a semi-transparent painting technique. Boyd answered this technique with his own recipe of oil and tempera. Boyd had begun to use tempera in his biblical pictures from about 1946, having been encouraged during the war years by Albert Tucker to study a textbook by Max Doemer. This medium imparted to his compositions at this time a glowing colour that he had achieved hitherto only through the glazes in his pottery studio6 (see the tile, Baptism c.1947 also in the Queensland Art Gallery Collection). It was through tempera that Boyd was to match the ethos of Queensland and Central Australian landscapes captured with such stark power by his future brother-in-law, Sidney Nolan, between 1948 and 1950. The horizontal veils of pigment in Berwick landscape, which describe the distant striations of cloud and mountain range and caress the hills and vales below from one side of the picture plane to the other, prefigure the brilliant Wimmera series soon to come. Then, darkness was chased away nearly completely for most of the early years of the decade, and Boyd became acclaimed as one of Australia's greatest landscape painters. Barry Pearce is Head Curator, Australian Art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. 208 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965