painter and potter, the last child born to potters Merric and Doris Boyd, grew up at Open Country, Murrumbeena, on the rural outskirts of Melbourne. Like her sister and brothers – the artists Lucy, Arthur , Guy and David Boyd – Mary learned to pot and paint from the cradle. Known to art audiences as the wife of John Perceval, mother of artists Matthew (b.1945), Tessa (b.1947), Celia (b.1949) and Alice (b.1957), and the wife and constant companion of Sidney Nolan in the final phase of his life, Mary Boyd is a more central figure in the postwar art world than the absence of an oeuvre might suggest. Her early environment was one of female initiative. Indeed, the Boyd children were guided in their childhood by a powerful trio of women: Doris, who had studied at the Gallery School and who continued to paint after her marriage; 'Granny Gough’, a Fabian, pacifist and women’s rights campaigner, who in her retirement built a cottage at Murrumbeena; and 'Granny Boyd’, the painter Emma Minnie Boyd , who was the financial mainstay of Open Country during difficult times.

Mary’s paternal grandmother had exhibited alongside Streeton , Roberts and Conder and preserved a sense of independence, knowing very little of the encroaching world of commercially-driven reputations which, in Emma Minnie’s lifetime, ousted the cultural production of a genteel class. This increasingly competitive ethos kept Doris Boyd in the background and helped stifle the talent of an emerging generation of female artists. In the 1940s Murrumbeena became synonymous with the 'Arthur Merric Boyd Pottery’: with Arthur Boyd, John Perceval, Peter Herbst, Neil Douglas and others who, while despising the new commercial culture, nevertheless needed to establish themselves in the market place.

Whereas commercial necessity generated passion in Arthur Boyd and a succession of vigorous canvases deconstructing the cultural forces which were promising to make art practice profitable in postwar Melbourne, this turn of events had the effect of inhibiting involvement on the part of his youngest sister, whose painting Hands is a convulsed testimony to the pain of her confrontation with a brutal world outside the Murrumbeena commune. Mary Boyd’s position was that of someone caught between two worlds: the world of Emma Minnie and Doris, for whom art was part of family life, and a world of self-projection for a critical and potentially hostile consumer audience. The former took art for granted as a part of living; the latter generated an adversarial art, one of alternate confrontation and defence.

Peter Herbst has remarked that Mary Boyd approached the activities of potting and painting 'instinctively and naturally’. While she did not make the choice of her sister and brothers to become a potter or painter or sculptor, she went on to produce some fine photographic work, known in the main to friends and family only. Apart from Hands , her presence at Murrumbeena had its enduring record in the work of others.

There is Arthur Boyd’s Portrait of Mary Boyd Aged Twelve (1939) and Portrait of Mary Boyd (1939) from the Bundanon Collection. Guy Boyd’s bronze Bather at Waterfall (1986) reputedly takes as its subject an adolescent memory of female beauty represented by the sculptor’s younger sister. In their Brueghelian celebration of communal life, John Perceval’s nativities and related works of the 1940s abound with visual references to Mary, eg. Nativity II (1947, Rockhampton AG). In 2007 Boyd was stilll living mostly in Wales on the estate she and Nolan turned into a centre for communal art activities. This quietly influential Australian bears with her a cultural DNA that is persistently Murrumbeena.

Writers:

Dobrez, Patricia

Date written:

1995

Last updated:

2011