Deutscher and Hackett

Penleigh Boyd was one the first Australian artists to serve in the battlefields of Europe, where he fulfilled the role of a sapper in WWI. A sapper’s expertise was engineering and he became responsible for tunnelling and establishing trenches. Tragically while in the trenches at Ypres, West Flanders in 1917, Boyd was gassed, causing permanent lung damage. He was evacuated back to England and eventually, back to Warrandyte, Victoria in 1918, where he continued to paint unhindered by his injury. Kangaroo Ground, Warrandyte, stems from this period and in the context of Penleigh Boyd’s wartime experience, the work could be considered as a pacifist, antiwar painting. 

 

The cutting in the foreground of the work is not some arbitrary feature, it is something Boyd would have understood well and had great feeling for. But rather than rising from the trench to a battlefield scene, the artist takes us up to a landscape which is distant, lush and beautifullyserene. The artist has chosen to exaggerate the horizon to suggest thearc of the earth, which hints at the world beyond and signals that the subject of the work has a worldly context beyond the idyllic landscape depicted. 

 

The rolling hills of Warrandyte depicted here by Penleigh Boyd were a world away from Flanders fields. But the idea that Penleigh Boyd created this current work en plein air, immersed in the contented majesty of nature, while reflecting on his wartime experiences, leaves us with a profound feeling of empathy. It is a work modest in size, but the scale of its impetus is immeasurable. On 28 November 1922, Boyd made the fateful decision to take his new Hudson car for a drive to Sydney. On a sharp bend near Warragal he lost control of his car and died from his injuries at the scene aged 33.

 

HENRY MULHOLLAND