Emma Minnie Boyd

Emma Minnie Boyd (1858–1936) was an experienced and prolific Australian artist who exhibited publicly from 1874, as a gifted teenager, to 1932. She showed 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.
Amongst her teachers were Julie Vieusseux and Louis Buvelot, with whom she shared a facility for landscape watercolour. 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.
For many years she has been documented only as the mother of significant artists Penleigh Boyd and Merric Boyd and novelist Martin Boyd (her daughter Helen Read was also a prolific 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.