BOYD, EMMA MINNIE (1858-1936)

"View Of The Bay" (c.1900)
watercolour
cm
signed lower right
*private collection, Melbourne
 
Boyd was a pioneering, prolific Australian Artist, (& matriarch of the Boyd Dynasty). She exhibited publicly from 1874, as a gifted teenager. She showed with the Victorian Artists Society, the Centennial International Exhibition 1888 (Melbourne), & the Royal Academy (London). She also studied at the National Gallery of Victoria School, & exhibited regularly with artists' societies whilst she was studying, given that she had first exhibited competent works prior to having formal training. Amongst her teachers were Julie Vieusseux & Louis Buvelot, with whom she shared a facility for landscape watercolour. She painted oil paintings of interior genre scenes of elegant high life, & some social conscience subjects of the poor & marginal in Victorian Melbourne & Britain. These oil paintings establish her as one of the more versatile Australian women artists of the 1880-90s. From 1890-3 she worked overseas in Britain but also painting on the continent, even whilst she was raising a family. The loss of family investments in the crash brought Emma & her husband back to Melbourne, where she taught art students in her studio. For many years she has been documented only as the wife of Arthur Boyd Sr., mother of significant artists Penleigh & Merric Boyd, & novelists Martin Boyd & Helen Read, & grandma of Arthur Boyd Jr., but she was one of the most prolific women artists of her generation in Melbourne, with a career that significantly outlasted that of Jane Sutherland. Emma Minnie Boyd's art was shown in its own right as works of historical & curatorial merit in the 1992-3 touring exhibition Completing the Picture: Women Artists & the Heidelberg School, at the Heide Museum, & a retrospective at the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery.