PENLEIGH BOYD

Smith & Singer are delighted to offer Penleigh Boyd's Silver Light, Hawkesbury River 1922 for Private Sale.

During his lifetime, and in the decades following his premature death at the age of thirty-three, Penleigh Boyd received the greatest recognition for his evocative depictions of the Australian landscape shown under heightened atmospheric conditions.

Boyd’s life and art was inextricably connected to the First World War.  Serving with the Australian Imperial Forces in France, he was badly gassed at Ypres in September 1917, and convalesced in England, before returning home to Melbourne in March 1918.  Although surviving his wartime experiences, Boyd’s death in a motor car accident in 1923, inadvertently aligned him to the ‘lost generation’ of young men killed in action, his loss mourned by the art and wider community.

Penleigh Boyd’s river and seascapes – including the Yarra and Hawkesbury Rivers – offer a reaffirmation of the beauty, purity and truth found in nature.  These harmonious and peaceful landscapes – bathed in an almost ethereal light – provide a contrast between the beauty of the natural world and the sinister face of war.  Boyd’s home at Warrandyte, nestled on the Yarra River twenty-four kilometres north-east of Melbourne, remained intact as an environment which ‘could induce the atmosphere of tranquil detachment from external and material things which I believe is considered necessary for the production of great art.’ (Penleigh Boyd, Salvage: Pictures and Impressions of the Western Front, The British Australasian, London, 1918, reprinted Australian War Memorial Facsimile Editions, Canberra, 1983)

Imbued with a strong sense of place, identify and emotion, Boyd’s paintings such as Silver Light, Hawkesbury River, assisted in the creation of a national iconography that remains as poignant and meaningful more than a century later.