On Arthur Boyd by Brenda Niall

Author:Brenda Niall [Niall, Brenda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General
ISBN: 9780522870541
Google: WQWODwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing
Published: 2016-03-22T00:43:05+00:00

Arthur was always uncomfortable about the notion of art as possession: ‘in a way I feel guilty when I sign my name’, he said.33 Yet landscapes could be destroyed and so could buildings and paintings. When Arthur spoke of the loss of Open Country and The Grange (‘bulldozed flat—you wouldn’t even know they’d been there’34) he was not thinking only of the houses. The quarry for which The Grange was wrecked, and the ugly block of flats that replaced Open Country, defaced the landscape and wiped out family memories. No one would ever again see the Harkaway hills as Arthur had painted them or as Martin had written about them. The paintings survived and so did the novels, but Arthur’s frescoes were badly damaged. Salvaged in fragments, they cannot be seen as a whole.35 The destruction of Open Country left Arthur painfully aware of family treasures which had not survived. A frieze, ‘yellow and lime green, pure light & colour, rather impressionist’, which sixteen-year-old Arthur had painted on the walls of his mother’s bedroom, was only one of many losses.36 Could anyone safeguard a house or landscape, or make sure that a work of art was not defaced or thrown away? While Arthur’s creative energy in his London years seemed totally absorbed in the present, he never quite put aside the questions of having and keeping.

Although recognition as a painter brought considerable wealth to Arthur Boyd, it’s hard to imagine him checking the Nasdaq index in his morning paper. It would have been too abstract, as well as too commercial. What kindled his imagination was something he could see and paint, and if a paintable landscape had a house as a focal point, then the spark was well alight. The idea of the house was also closely linked with Arthur’s sense of family life, and he made sure his children all had that secure centre. As well as 13 Hampstead Lane, he bought a house in nearby Grove Terrace for his daughter Polly, and one for his son Jamie in picturesque Flask Walk, the same little street where he and Yvonne had rented a house in their early London years. Later he would do as much for his younger daughter Lucy Ellen for whom he financed the conversion of a large coachhouse on a country estate in Bedfordshire. The bayside house at Beaumaris, which the Boyds left behind in 1959 to sail for England, remained in the family: his sister Lucy and her husband Hatton Beck lived there for some time, and it was eventually made over to Lucy Ellen as her link with Australia. When Arthur and Yvonne began to spend more time in the Suffolk cottage, Jamie took over 13 Hampstead Lane for his growing family. Polly moved back to Australia in the early 1980s and her Grove Terrace house became the London base for her parents and family members on their travels.

It would be hard to say whether Arthur found his houses or they found him. In

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