‘and he was driven from men, and did eat grass as oxen, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven, till his hairs were grown like eagle’s feathers, and his nails like birds’ claws.’ Daniel: 4:33

Arthur Boyd’s Nebuchadnezzar series was one of the most challenging and soul-searching of his career and embodied much of his humanist angst and distress at the continuing atrocity of the Vietnam War; and twenty paintings from the sequence were shown to stunning effect in the recent exhibition Man on Fire: Visions of Nebuchadnezzar at Bundanon, the property Boyd and his wife Yvonne gifted to the Australian nation in 1993.¹ The artist’s tale of the biblical king is depicted across a total of thirty-four emotionally charged canvases² in a narrative augmented by imagined out-of-body experiences suffered by the hubristic ruler as he ponders his fame, his disgrace and his possible redemption. Seated Nebuchadnezzar with a crying lion, 1966 – 67, refers to one of the many encounters Nebuchadnezzar had with wild animals as he wandered through seven years of exile and ‘dwelt with the beasts of the field.’³ Boyd’s interest in such Old Testament stories dated from his childhood when his grandmother would read aloud from her battered bible, ‘the tinted engravings in the text being as marvellous as they were bizarre, often even gruesome.’⁴ In the 1940s, he embarked on his own biblical paintings, often set within a seething Melbourne, with subjects such as The golden calf, 1946 (Ballarat Fine Art Gallery) and the Garden of Eden in The Expulsion, 1947 – 48 (Art Gallery of New South Wales).

By the 1960s, Boyd was firmly domiciled in England and the growing opposition to the War, particularly among young Londoners, was being played out in greater and greater extremes. Indeed, Boyd acknowledged that it was the self-immolation of Peter Tyrrell in April 1967 on Hampstead Heath, near the artist’s home, that partially informed his depiction of Nebuchadnezzar in flames, bringing to mind earlier memories of the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức who had taken the same action in Saigon in 1963.⁵ Boyd’s palette too had changed from the sombre tones of the 1940s paintings and was now full of understandably vivid and expressionist reds, yellows and oranges, used to great effect here in Seated Nebuchadnezzar with a crying lion. The exiled king, whose name would originally have been written as Nabu-kudurri-usur, meaning ‘Nabu protect my eldest son’, is depicted by Boyd as having encounters with a variety of animals including crows, stoats and black rams. Lions appear in at least seven other paintings reproduced in T. S. R. Boase’s 1972 book on the series and the lion shown here, being comforted by Nebuchadnezzar, has the associated text: ‘The lion lays its head in the king’s lap and weeps, and the beast’s sympathy brings a semblance of restored humanity to the outcast ruler.’⁶ The intense cadmium red locks both figures within the canvas as if constrained by their mutual suffering, the ‘paint applied in sweeping strokes, frantic slashes, flurries of flicking curls and tight impasto coils… punctuated by daubs and gashes of bright colour.’⁷ The prominent orange gonads are also a recurrent reference throughout the series, used by Boyd to symbolise bestial lust, which he believed was at the root of all human passions, including loss.

1. Man on Fire: Visions of Nebuchadnezzar, Bundanon Art Museum, New South Wales, 4 July – 11 October 2026.
2. See Hoff, U., The Art of Arthur Boyd, London, 1986, p. 57
3. Book of Daniel: 4:33
4. Gunn, G., ‘Tribute. Arthur Boyd: 1920 – 1999’, Art and Australia, Sydney, vol. 37 no. 2, December 1999/January – February 2000, p. 207
5. Tyrrell was actually protesting sexual abuse he had received at industrial schools run by the Christian Brothers in his youth. As his burnt body was not identified for a year, the act was misinterpreted as a war protest.
6. Boase, T. S. R., and Boyd, A., Nebuchadnezzar, Thames & Hudson, London, 1972, pl. 38
7. Jefferson, D., ‘‘Charged with horror and anguish’: Arthur Boyd’s nightmarish Nebuchadnezzar series opens in major new Bundanon show’, The Guardian, 7 July 2026 at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2026/jul/07/arthur-boyd-nebuchadnezzar-series-bundanon-art-exhibition-vietnam-war-paintings (accessed 20 August 2026)

ANDREW GAYNOR