Went to the November 2010 Leonard Joel auction (second pic down) to buy something by Klytie Pate the other day (see top pic) and came home with this pot by Merric Boyd (third down) which was signed and dated 1915.
Klytie is getting out of my reach.
Am finding myself fascinated by the whole Boyd clan and am looking forward to reading "The Boyds" by Brenda Niall after christmas.
Meanwhile, here is my (slightly over-romanticised- and who knows how accurate) research about my own special example;
Merric Boyd was about 27 years old when he made it, the year he married Doris Gough and within two year would depart for the second world war.
He had been making ceramics for about 5 years and living at "Open Country" for two years and this pot is made from local clays, less than a kilometre from where I live.
This pot reminds me of the female form- I am not surprised that it is the year he was married!
It has one of his typical, gnarled trees, in the blue and cream from that period but its more optimistic, upright, less weathered than his work from later in his life, after the war, after his kiln burnt down, after his epilepsy started to worsen and his religious preoccupations became more intense, and his trees become more bent and windswept (examples at right).
There is a small landscape on the other side which is typical of Doris's work and I believe, like many of their pots, that this was a joint effort..
There is a travelling exhibition of his work and that of his possibly more famous son, Arthur Boyd, at the mornington peninsula regional gallery over the next three months which I am planning to visit..
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