Penleigh Boyd

Who was Penleigh Boyd?

Theodore Penleigh Boyd was an Australian artist.

Penleigh Boyd was a member of the Boyd artistic dynasty: his parents Arthur Merric Boyd and Emma Minnie Boyd were well-known artists of the day, and his brothers included Merric Boyd the ceramacist and the novelist Martin Boyd. His son Robin Boyd became a famous and influential architect, educator and social commentator, and his nephews Arthur Boyd, Guy Boyd and David Boyd became prominent artists.

Born in England at Penleigh House, Westbury, Wiltshire, Boyd received his artistic training from his parents and at the National Gallery Art School. He had his first exhibition at the Victorian Artists' Society at 18, and exhibited at the Royal Academy in London at 21. He won second prize in the Australian Federal Government's competition for a painting of the site of the new national capital, Canberra. He won the Wynne Prize in 1914 with Landscape.

His Queensland-born wife, Edith Susan Gerard Anderson, was herself a skilled painter and also came from a cultivated family. Her father had been Director of the Queensland Department of Public Instruction, her brother Arthur was a prominent doctor, and her eldest sister Maud was of one of the first women to graduate with a B.A. degree from the University of Sydney.