Design and Art Australia Online

painter and cartoonist, was born into the wealthy and artistic Anglo-Australian Boyd family in Wiltshire, England, on 15 August 1890, the third son of artists Arthur Merric Boyd and Emma Minnie Boyd (née a’Beckett). He enrolled at the National Gallery of Victoria Schools in 1905, aged 15, and studied there under Bernard Hall and Frederick McCubbin until 1909, exhibiting with the VAS from 1908. His 1910 oil painting The Boyd Homestead at Yarra Glen shows his parents’ farm 'Tralee' where Penleigh spent many weekends and holidays (auctioned Sotheby’s Melbourne, May 2000, lot 85). It was probably included in his first solo show at the Guildhall, Melbourne, in 1910 (catalogue unlocated acc. Sotheby’s).

He had a second solo show before travelling to Europe in 1911. There his Springtime was hung at London's Royal Academy. In Paris he met the Queensland painter, playwright Edith Susan Gerard Anderson (1880-1961), born in Brisbane (then Phillips Fox’s favourite model). They married in Paris on 15 October 1912, returned to Melbourne on a honeymoon tour and settled at Tralee. In 1913, Boyd won second prize in the Federal capital site competition and held another solo exhibition of his paintings. The following year they moved to Warrandyte, Penleigh won the Wynne Prize for landscape and exhibited his landscape paintings in Venice, Paris, Sydney, Tasmania and Victoria.

In November 1915 he enlisted in the AIF and was sent to the transport section of the Australian Electrical and Mechanical Mining and Boring Company, where he became a sergeant. Having been badly gassed at Ypres, he was invalided to England where he published Salvage: Pictures and Impressions of the Western Front by An Australian Artist, Sergt Penleigh Boyd, Electrical & Mechanical Mining Co., A.I.F. (London: The British Australasian, 1918, 2/6). A facsimile reprint with introduction by Anne Gray was issued by the AWM in 1983. It has 20 [serious] black and white drawings of life at the front drawn between August 1916 and September 1917 and, what Tipping calls, a 'racy text’. He commented about the sketches: 'I drew chiefly to occupy my time and distract my thoughts, during the long hours of rumbling bombardment overhead’ (intro). He drew mostly with a mapping pen whose nib holder he wrapped with fuse wire in order to weigh the nib down and produce a better line (letter to wife 8 September 1916, quoted Gray). Retrospective drawings of the war made in a sketchbook c.1918 include a comical ink drawing: 'ALF. [on high ground to half submerged mate]: “You’ll find it a lot drier over 'ere, 'Enery’ (p.c., ill. Gray).

He drew war cartoons for the Bulletin in 1918-19. Surviving originals include: '“Pinched yer primus 'ave we? You come in an’ make them accusations to our Sergeant and se what you get” (enemy retires Bluffed)’, which shows two soldiers in undress blocking a doorway while their sergeant cooks over a primus in the rear of the room (Px*D447/10, paid 13 June 1918); a view of two soldiers in a rat-infested ruin, 'Alf (just out of the line after tough spell): “Ain’t this 'Eaven Bill”’ (Px*D447/18, paid 10 October 1918); and a clever drawing of two soldiers on a battlefield titled 'Resource’: “What’s up, Bill?”/ “I’m tryin’ to look like a sandbag” (Px*D447/17, paid 23 January 1919). The AWM holds his undated (1918, according to Gray) original cartoon 'The little mistakes of war’, a pen and ink drawing acquired 1982, showing an arrogant new subaltern poking an old tired, seated soldier with his cane: 'New Sub: “What’s your Battalion, my man?”/ Old Hand: “78th”/ New Sub: “Who’s the C.O.?”/ Old Hand: “I am”.

Boyd’s illustration of a soldier reunited with his beloved illustrating a sentimental poem by 'S.D.L.’, 'To “Her”’ (’...the end of the Great Adventure’) was published in Homeward on the H.M.T. A.14, the souvenir magazine of the HMAT A14 – the ship on which he returned to Australia (Sydney, March 1918: in AWM Printed Records collection, troopship serials, S79/4). Boyd also did the cover with an art nouveau waratah decoration and coloured picture of a wounded digger gazing out from the ship to a flat blue mountain [Cape of Good Hope?] as well as several other illustrations (Kent).

In 1918 he held an exhibition of landscape paintings at the VAS, for which he is now known. In 1919, aged 29, he joined the Melbourne Savage Club. Despite continuing to suffer the effects of gas, he had annual solo shows of his oil and watercolour paintings in 1920, 1921 and 1922. Works of this period include Lorne, Victoria 1921, oil on canvas (Christie’s Australian and European Paintings, Sculpture, Drawings and Prints, Part I & II, Melbourne 25-26 November 1997, lot 128, est. $15,000-20,000). His best-known painting, Wattle Blossom, was hung in the RA Summer Show, London in 1923. A similar painting, Warrandyte, hangs in the Social Room of the Savage Club (ill. Johnson, 111).

On 28 November 1923, aged 33, Penleigh Boyd was killed instantly in a car accident en route to Sydney, where the family was then living. One of his two sons was the Melbourne architect Robin Boyd.

Writers:

Kerr, Joan

Date written:

1996

Last updated:

2007