Wherever I’ve lived for the past 30 years, artist Arthur Boyd was there too. A hand-coloured lithograph that I call Arthur, bought with the proceeds of a freak Melbourne Cup win, has hung on the walls of my homes in Canberra, Sydney, Washington and Paris. When I bought it, I was asked: “Will it match your furniture?” Ha.
I didn’t own a house or any furniture back then, except a wonderfully awful gold couch, a street find that matched the equally delightful gold flock wallpaper in the house I was renting. Called Magic Flute, Queen of the Night , the print, which originally had a beautiful gold leaf frame, features a cockatoo that seems to be coming to a screeching, swooping stop on the viewer. Some of Arthur Boyd’s landscapes from 1984 are on show at Bundanon for the first time.
Credit: When I first visited Bundanon Art Museum and The Bridge, which opened in 2022, I looked for Boyd’s cockatoo-filled landscapes. Most of his work was corralled in the museum’s other site, where the old Boyd Homestead is packed with work by four generations of Boyds. Like me, many visitors to the art museum are surprised by a lack of major paintings by Boyd who, with his wife Yvonne, gave the 1000-hectare wildlife sanctuary on the Shoalhaven River near Nowra and their $46 million art collection to the people of Australia.
That will no longer be the case. Bundanon plans to open a permanent Boyd Collection gallery space within the art museum this year. It will be designed by architect .