Current Location: In storage
Titles
Tile from 'The Temptation of St Anthony'
Maker(s)
Artist:
Boyd, Arthur Merric Bloomfield
Entities
Categories
Description
Large ceramic tile/panel, painted, depicting a naked woman with blonde hair swinging from a branch, in front of a naked man, a male water nymph, both arms raised, from whose navel water spurts into a pool below. Tile/panel edged with metal (lead?)
Large ceramic tile/panel, painted, depicting a naked woman with blonde hair swinging from a branch, in front of a naked man, a male water nymph, both arms raised, from whose navel water spurts into a pool below. Tile/panel edged with metal (lead?)
Legal notes
Bequeathed by Tom Rosenthal
Measurements and weight
Length: 55 cm
Width: 53 cm
Acquisition and important dates
Method of acquisition: Bequeathed
(2021-09-27)
by
Rosenthal, Tom
Dating
20th Century, Mid
1950
-
1951
Note
Arthur Boyd (1920–99) was one of Australia’s leading twentieth-century artists. Best-known for his paintings and drawings, he also made ceramic (tile) paintings from 1949 onwards. Working in both Impressionist and Expressionist styles, much of Boyd’s work was set in the Australian landscape and often had a strong social conscience or took Biblical stories as its starting point. Boyd began making tile (ceramic) paintings in 1949. He lived in England between 1959 and 1968, showing his ceramics paintings at the Zwemmer Gallery in 1960 and recent work at the Whitechapel Gallery, in 1962. Tom Rosenthal, critic and publisher, who bequeathed this tile, described the ‘passionate and obsessive humanism of Arthur Boyd’ and was a great supporter of his work.
This is one of 9 tiles that comprised 'The Temptation of St Anthony' (1950–51), one of Boyd’s largest ceramic ‘pictures’. It is described by Franz Philipp in his 1967 study of Boyd as follows: ‘The main female temptress is suspended from a bare branch in a swing of full exposure, her background companion, a very literal fountain nymph, spews the waterjet into the pool.’ This subject was favoured by Bosch and by the sixteenth-century Mannerists and was usually given a strongly erotic flavour, echoed here by Boyd.
Materials used in production
Ceramic
Techniques used in production
Painted
Identification numbers
Accession number: C.4-2021
Primary reference Number: 306966
Stable URI
Audit data
Created: Thursday 7 October 2021
Updated: Monday 7 August 2023
Last processed: Friday 8 December 2023
Associated departments & institutions
Owner or interested party:
The Fitzwilliam Museum
Associated department:
Applied Arts
