Doris Boyd

Doris Lucy Eleanor Bloomfield Boyd (20 November 1888^[1] – 13 June 1960) (née Gough) was an Australian artist, active as a painter and ceramicist. Doris Gough and a young potter and graphic artist Merric Boyd married. Merric had brothers Penleigh, a painter and Martin a writer, and with their painter parents Arthur Merric Boyd and Emma Minnie à Beckett Boyd comprised, with Doris' marriage to Merric in 1915, the then artistic element of the Boyd family.

Doris and Merric raised five children. Lucy, Arthur (painter, ceramics), Guy (pottery,sculpture), David (pottery, painting) and Mary. Doris and Merric saw their sons rise to success in Australia and internationally, and their daughters to marry happily. Doris was also to see the nascent expressions of her grand children in the arts.

Life

Doris Boyd was the youngest of six children, born of Victorian Naval Forces Lieutenant Thomas Bunbury Gough and Evelyn Anna Walker Gough (née Rigg). Doris grew up in an unusual household, in which her mother’s buoyant spirit, radical politics and Christian Science faith contrasted with her father’s conservative background and temperament. Bunbury Gough was a Lieutenant in the Victorian Navy between 1885 and 1888, a high rank in the Victorian Navy at the time. As Lieutenant, he was in charge of the running of the HMVS Cerberus when the Commander (the highest rank in the Navy) was not on board. Outside of his naval career in Victoria he variously worked as a merchant, as an insurance agent and as a commission agent like his father-in-law. Evelyn was co-proprietor of The Sun: A Society Courier.^[2][3]

Boyd studied under Bernard Hall and Frederick McCubbin at the National Gallery School where she met William "Merric" Boyd, a fellow student and potter. They married in 1915. Doris decorated much of Merric Boyd's works between 1920 and 1930; mostly pieces for domestic use, where Australian flora and fauna were often used as decorative tools.^[4] The Boyd's Murrumbeena workshop was destroyed by fire in 1926.^[5] Merric Boyd worked commercially and was able to provide for his family as he and Doris raised painters Arthur and David, and sculptor Guy and their two daughters. Mary, the youngest, married artist John Perceval, and later Sydney Nolan.^[3]

With a strong faith in Christian Science, Doris influenced her husband Merric, who had fallen to epilepsy, to convert in his latter years.^[5] She died on 13 June 1960, nine months after the death of her husband, Merric.^[4]

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