ARTHUR BOYD

Smith & Singer are delighted to offer Arthur Boyd's Old Mine Shaft (1959) for private sale.

Arthur Boyd’s evocative landscape subjects of the late 1950s occupy a special place within the history and development of landscape painting in Australian art.  As the artist remarked to the author, these paintings directly referred to the naturalistic images created in the late nineteenth century by Charles Conder, Frederick McCubbin, Tom Roberts, and Arthur Streeton, who found inspiration in bush and bay subjects located in close proximity to their own domestic environments.

Many of Boyd’s compositions from this period focused on rugged claustrophobic bush scenes showing tangled scrub amidst a profusion of native wildflowers and grasses, as well as the more sunny and open landscapes of Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula.  In each of these detailed studies Boyd took particular delight in expressing the tactility and disorder of the Australian bush, whereby the application of thick pigment with both the front and back of his paint brush was further worked to create a surface rich in a variety of textures.

One of the most famous of Boyd’s images from this period is the sensuous and delightful Old Mine Shaft (1959), which within Australian art historical terms, shares parallels with Frederick McCubbin’s Lost (1886, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne).  The work elicited particular praise from Franz Philipp, who declared: ‘There are other, more open, sunny and optimistic bush landscapes; one of the finest is Old Mine Shaft.  The foreground is open, the thickly textured weave of grasses and weeds spattered with the red and white of wildflowers; the colour-flick of a child’s dress (“The lost child”) and of “bluebirds” adds further accents of brightness.’

Old Mine Shaft represents a rare opportunity to acquire a major composition from one of Australia’s most influential and beloved artists.