Boyd-Corner - Public domain portrait drawing

Emma Minnie Boyd was a prolific painter and exhibited her work frequently. She was one of the more versatile Australian artists and her work was varied. She was a contemporary of Artists like James Conder, Arthur Streeton, Frederick McCubbin and Tom Roberts and her work was exhibited alongside theirs. Both the Boyd’s were acquainted with the artists who worked at the Heidelberg School but family and circumstance prevented them from also taking part. As a newly married couple they would be expected to set up house together and see about starting a family, it would not have been appropriate for them to be gallivanting across the countryside with a group of other painters. Because of this it is possible that both their careers could have suffered without the professional relationships and recognition the Heidelberg school achieved with the public. Emma Minnie Boyd also worked with Louis Buvelot, with whom she shared a facility for landscape watercolour “and a cautious tonal impressionism, with its persistent echoes of the Dutch school.” In 1890 the Boyd’s went to Europe to work, with their two young sons, where their work was shown at the Royal academy of the Arts, Boyd made several works during her time there. she was a religious woman and painted many of her social conscience works overseas. The loss of family investments in the crash of the Melbourne land boom brought Emma and her husband back to Melbourne, where she taught art students in her city studio. Her work Interior with figures, The Grange 1875 shows her talent for watercolour. Painted when she was just sixteen it is a snapshot of Australian life. The large bay window is shaded by galvanised iron typical of Australian homes of the period. The interior is relaxed, with the window opened. A young Man sits on the window ledge not quite inside or outside the room, his companion, a young woman is seated inside, sewing. There is a relaxed atmosphere with the messy sewing box and two cats playing by a chair to the left of the painting. The spatial relationship of the kittens imitates that of the man and the woman. It comments on the relaxed atmosphere and social obligations that were a part of colonial society in Australia. Even during Victorian times social standards and decorum was not as strict as it was in Britain. She painted many watercolour landscape paintings of the Australian Bush; these works were popular with the public because the Australian landscape is quite unique to Australia and it represented a sense of national pride leading up to federation in 1901.[8] She died at Sandringham on 13 September 1936, survived by two of her sons and her daughter.