Arthur Merric Boyd

Who was Arthur Merric Boyd?

Arthur Merric Boyd was an Australian painter. He and his wife Emma Minnie established a lifestyle of being artists which many generations followed to create the popular image of the Boyd family.

Boyd was born in Opoho, Dunedin, New Zealand, son of Captain John Theodore Thomas Boyd, formerly of County Mayo, Ireland, and his wife Lucy Charlotte, daughter of Dr Robert Martin of Heidelberg, Victoria. The Boyds moved to Australia in the mid-1870s, and on 14 January 1886 Boyd married Emma Minnie à Beckett, also an artist, daughter of the Hon. W. A. C. à Beckett of Melbourne. In 1890 they moved to England and lived for a time at Penleigh House, Westbury, Wiltshire, and in 1891 husband and wife each had a picture in the Royal Academy exhibition.

Boyd then travelled and painted a good deal on the continent of Europe, and returned to Australia about the end of 1893, where he lived mostly in Sandringham and other suburbs of Melbourne for the rest of his life. He occasionally sent good work to the exhibitions of the Victorian Artists' Society, but never mixed much in the artistic life of his time.

Mrs. Boyd died at Melbourne on 13 September 1936 and her husband, on the property of his son, Merric at Murrumbeena, on 30 July 1940. Each is represented by a picture in the National Gallery of Victoria at Melbourne.