Emma Minnie Boyd

Partly thanks to her mother’s fortune, Emma Minnie Boyd lived a very comfortable life with her family, growing up in Melbourne.

The à Beckett's were able to give the young couple and their children the means to pursue careers in the arts.

After her marriage Emma Minnie and Arthur Merric Boyd continued to receive support from her family.

She 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.

As a newly married couple they would be expected to set up house together and see about starting a family, it would not have been appropriate for them to be gallivanting across the countryside with a group of other painters.

The large bay window is shaded by galvanised iron typical of Australian homes of the period.

There is a relaxed atmosphere with the messy sewing box and two cats playing by a chair to the left of the painting.

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.

Hammond, V & Peers, J 1992, Completing the Picture: Women Artists and the Heidelberg Era, Artmores, Hawthorn, Victoria, Australia.