The Boyds

The Boyd family is Australia's most remarkable and well known artistic dynasty. Most people know of the great Arthur Boyd, but descendants of landscape painter Emma Minnie a Beckett and her husband Arthur Merric Boyd also include potter Merric Boyd, painter Penleigh Boyd, novelist Martin Boyd, architect and writer Robin Boyd, painter Arthur Boyd, sculptor Guy Boyd, painter and potter David Boyd, ceramic artist Lucy Boyd Beck and painter Mary Boyd, whose first husband was painter John Perceval and who later married Sidney Nolan. This 'family biography' by award-winning writer Brenda Niall traces the emergence of an extraordinary artistic tradition. She places the Boyds in their historical and personal contexts, tells the interwoven stories of their brilliant careers, and analyses the shaping influences on their lives. Niall's narrative is shaped around a sequence of Boyd family houses in Australia and Europe, from a Wiltshire manor house to a farm in Yarra Glen and a pottery in Murrumbeena, to David Boyd's olive grove in the South of France, and finally to Bundanon - the homestead that Arthur Boyd gave to the Australian people.