Emma Minnie (a'Beckett) Boyd (1858 - 1936)

Born 23 Nov 1858 in Collingwood, Victoria, Australia

Ancestors

Descendants

Died 13 Sep 1936 at age 77 in Sandringham, Victoria, Australia

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Biography

Minnie (a'Beckett) Boyd was born in the Colony of Victoria (1851-1900)

Emma Minnie Boyd, nee à Beckett was born in Melbourne in on 23 November 1858. She was the second child of her parents William Arthur à Beckett and Emma Mills à Beckett. Her mother Emma Mills à Beckett was the Heiress of the John Mills fortune. Emma Minnie Boyd was known by her second name “Minnie” so as not to be confused for her mother. Partly thanks to her mother’s fortune, Emma Minnie Boyd lived a very comfortable life with her family, growing up in Melbourne.

From an early age she showed an interest in the arts, painting and drawing particularly. She studied at the National Gallery of Victoria School and exhibited regularly while studying.

Emma Minnie Boyd was an experienced and prolific Australian artist who exhibited publicly from 1874, as a gifted teenager, to 1932. She exhibited with the Victorian Artists Society, the Centennial International Exhibition 1888 (Melbourne), the Royal Academy of Arts (London), and 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.[2]

Amongst her teachers were Julie Vieusseux and Louis Buvelot. 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. She 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.

From 1890–1893 she lived and worked overseas, settling in Britain but also painting on the continent, even whilst she was raising a family. 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.[3]

For many years she has been documented as the mother of significant artists Penleigh Boyd and Merric Boyd and novelist Martin Boyd (her daughter Helen Read was also an 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.

Emma Minnie Boyd 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.

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.”[5]

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.[6]

She died at Sandringham on 13 September 1936, survived by her husband, two of her sons and her daughter.

^[1]

Sources

1. ↑ 2. Table Talk, Melbourne, 28 August 1902, p. 29 3. Associated families to residents of Upper Beaconsfield and surrounding areas. 4. Niall, Brenda (2002). the Boyds: a family biography. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. 5. Dobrez, Patricia; Herbst, Peter (1990). The Art of the Boyds: Generations of Artistic Achievement. Sydney: Bay Books. p. 30. 6. Alexander, Jane (2004). Emma Minnie Boyd: 1858–1936. Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery.