Deutscher and Hackett

Stimulated by his friendship with the art historian and medieval scholar T.S. Boase in London in the late 1960s, Arthur Boyd embarked on a major artistic series depicting the travails of the Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar, whose story was related in the 2nd-century biblical apocalypse, the Book of Daniel. Created with fervent energy from 1966, Boyd’s series of paintings was initially intended to illustrate a text on the theme by Boase (who subsequently published 34 of the works in his dedicated tome in 1974), and was followed by many variations on the theme, including a pioneering group of tapestries based on the paintings, of which Cloud, 1968 was among the first. The ‘shocking, compelling and traumatic’ Nebuchadnezzar paintings had been exhibited to rapturous acclaim in Adelaide, Melbourne and Sydney in 19681, and a small group of 6 tapestries followed in February and April 1970 at Clune Galleries in Sydney and South Yarra Galleries in Melbourne. It was Cloud, replicating one of the most memorable images from the painted suite, Nebuchadnezzar making a cloud, which was chosen as the illustration for the cover of both exhibition catalogues.
 
No painter had ever before devoted himself to imagining the experiences of Nebuchadnezzar during his exile in the wilderness and descent into madness, punished for pride and blasphemy. Nebuchadnezzar making a cloud, 1969 (National Gallery of Australia) depicts the original sin of this story cycle: ‘the Jewish legend which told that Nebuchadnezzar made a cloud to hide him from human eyes so that he would be [invisible] like God.’2 While some of Boyd’s images from this series were based on written biblical accounts, they were also allegorically interwoven with recurrent motifs from his visual imagination and illustrations of his own contemporary social and political concerns. From a trunk emanating from the torso of the ghostly white king’s body, recumbent on green grass, Boyd’s cloud takes the form of an atomic mushroom cloud, emblazoned with a divine face that peers back down at the king. As Deborah Hart has suggested, ‘The envisioning of his power holds him captive. He is the maker of his own end, unable to lift himself from the enormity of his own creation.’3 We find here a poignant analogy with the man-made terror of the atom bomb, to which Boyd expressed his opposition in a peace march organised by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament at Easter in 1960 – ‘the largest demonstration London has seen this century.’4
 
Replicating the subtle streaks of colours from Boyd’s pastel works of Saint Francis and his gestural ferocity of the Nebuchadnezzar suite, the master weavers of Tapeçarias de Portalegre in Portugal translated Arthur Boyd’s imagery into textile on a vast scale. Encouraged by Frank McDonald, director of Clune Galleries and an enthusiast for the medium, tapestry became in the early 1960s a medium of interest for many Australian artists, including John Olsen, Sidney Nolan and John Coburn. Cloud was among the first tapestries to be woven from Arthur Boyd’s paintings, followed by a monumental 20-piece cycle of Saint Francis, now held in the National Gallery of Australia and to be the subject of a major solo exhibition there opening in June 2026.
 
1. McCaughey, P., ‘The Triumph’, The Age, Melbourne, 25 June 1968
2. Hoff, U., The Art of Arthur Boyd, Andre Deutsch, London, 1986, p. 57
3. Hart, D., Arthur Boyd. Agony and Ecstasy, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2014 p. 90
4. On this day 18 April 1960: Thousands protest against H-bomb, BBC, London at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/april/18/newsid_2909000... (accessed 16 October 2025)
 
LUCIE REEVES-SMITH