ARTHUR BOYD

Smith & Singer are delighted to offer Arthur Boyd's Fishing at Dusk on the Shoalhaven (circa 1983) for private sale.

Arthur Boyd’s preoccupation with the landscape of the Shoalhaven area, near Nowra in New South Wales, commenced in the summer of 1971, when he returned to Australia after living more than a decade in the United Kingdom.  For the next almost thirty years Boyd intermittently recorded the Shoalhaven River, Riversdale Hill and surroundings at various times of the day throughout the changing seasons.

During the early 1980s Boyd’s Shoalhaven landscapes became more ambitious, monumental and tactile as the artist began applying paint with his fingers as well as a brush.  Film footage showing the artist creating these paintings reveals both a primal response to the physical act of painting and an innate empathy and reverence to land and place.  Born from his obsession with and exploration of a particular landscape, these paintings of the river and the bush-covered escarpment behind have entered the Australian psyche, becoming some of the most recognisable images of the Australian landscape.

Impressive for its serene beauty and refined application of pigment, Fishing at Dusk on the Shoalhaven is a deceptively simple transcription of the view, without the mythological or allegorical subject matter introduced into many of the Shoalhaven pictures.  The work incorporates a number of the most familiar elements of the local iconography: the densely forested riverbanks with fallen tree-trunks, scattered boulders wedged into the hillside, and the smooth surface of the peaceful water, broken only by the mirrored reflections.  The landscape is ablaze with the vibrant opalescent colours of an Australian summer’s day as a lone fisherman quietly attends to his task.  It is a joyful, profound and splendid hymn to a much-loved landscape.

Fishing at Dusk on the Shoalhaven has long been regarded as amongst the very finest of the series and represents a special opportunity to acquire a major composition from one of Australia’s most influential and beloved artists. 

Pictured above 

ARTHUR BOYD 1920-1999 
Fishing at Dusk on the Shoalhaven (circa 1983) 
oil on canvas
120 x 100 cm 
For private sale  
© Arthur Boyd/Copyright Agency, 2022