Bio
Emma Minnie Boyd was an experienced and prolific Australian artist who exhibited publicly from 1874 as a gifted teenager to 1932 Amongst her teachers were Julie Vieusseux and Louis Buvelot with whom she shared a facility for landscape watercolour In 1876–79 and 1882 she studied at the National Gallery of Victoria School and exhibited regularly with artists’ societies whilst she was studying given that she had first exhibited competent works prior to having formal training Emma also painted some complex figurative oil paintings of interior genre scenes of elegant high life as well as some social conscience subjects of the poor and marginal in Victorian Melbourne and Britain These oil paintings establish her as one of the more versatile Australian women artists of the 1880s–1890s Emma married artist Arthur Merric Boyd in 1886 She exhibited with the Victorian Artists Society the Centennial International Exhibition 1888 (Melbourne) and from 1890–1893 she lived and worked overseas settling in Britain but also painting on the continent whilst she was raising a family Emma and her husband Arthur exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts (London 1891) after a brief stay in Paris the Boyd’s returned to Melbourne and in 1898 Emma Boyd’s works were included in the Exhibition of Australian Art in London at the Grafton Galleries Emma exhibited in a joint show with her husband at Como House in Melbourne in 1902 amongst other venues Over one hundred pounds worth of artworks were sold at the 1902 exhibition and commissions were given for further copies of works sold The family spent summers in Tasmania where Boyd painted landscapes For many years she has been documented only as the mother of significant artists Penleigh Boyd and Merric Boyd and novelist Martin Boyd (her daughter Helen Read was also a prolific artist) but she was one of the most prolific and consistent women artists of her generation in Melbourne with a career that significantly outlasted that of Jane Sutherland for example Emma Minnie Boyd’s art was shown in its own right as works of historical and curatorial merit in the 1992–1993 touring exhibition Completing the Picture: Women Artists and the Heidelberg School at the Heide Museum of Modern Art and elsewhere and in a retrospective in 2004 at the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery
