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watercolourist, diarist and public servant, was born on 16 December 1786 at Stubbington in Hampshire, England, son of a Hampshire gentleman and property-owner, Thomas Boyes. His mother Ann, née Blamey, died a month after his birth and Boyes passed an unsettled childhood, moving from household to household and from school to school. By his 13th year he had attended six educational establishments in or near Portsmouth. Whatever the effects of this diverse education (Boyes later complained of his lack of an 'elementary education’) it nevertheless kindled in him a thirst for learning and self-improvement.

Early artistic influences came from the Hampshire school of landscape and marine painters, including John Livesay, professor of drawing at the Portsmouth Naval College, with whose son he walked and sketched in Wales, and possibly from the painter, engraver and former pupil of Benjamin West, Richard Livesay (1750-1823), who also taught at the college. Boyes was a friend of another teacher there, John Christian Schetky, later marine painter to the King and collaborator with J.M.W. Turner on some of his marine paintings. One of Boyes’s letters suggests he himself may have taken tuition from Turner in 1819; his influence has been remarked in the water and light effects of some of Boyes’s watercolours. Such 'marine’ influences were perhaps countered by William Shayer (1788-1879) who achieved a national reputation for his landscapes of rural Hampshire. But perhaps the young Boyes was inspired most by the grand pastoral vision of Claude which had affected the early Turner as well as Boyes’s future artist-colleague and mentor, John Glover ; there are frequent references in Boyes’s early letters to 'Claude-like’ landscapes he has seen.

In 1809 Boyes joined the Commissariat Department as a treasury clerk and served there throughout the Peninsular Wars, seeing action at Walcheran and Vittoria. He was promoted deputy assistant commissary-general in 1813. As with other English artists at the Peninsula at this time (notably the Schetky brothers, John and Alick), Boyes was impressed by the Iberian mountainscapes; his sense of what he described later as 'their rugged and grotesque outlines stressing in intelligible language the power of time and the elements’ not only is present in many of his surviving sketches but also can be discerned in his later work.

Boyes married Mary Ediss (1800-81), daughter of a Portsea pawnbroker, on 3 September 1818. They lived in the picturesque village of Southwick, not far from Portsea, while Boyes indulged his taste for rural landscape. Retired on half-pay supplemented by a modest legacy, Boyes found his means increasingly inadequate to sustain both his growing family and his aesthetic pursuits. His interests included not only his watercolour painting, which never seems to have been profitable, but also violin lessons from the celebrated Paolo Spagnoletti. By November 1822 what he termed his financial 'embarrassments’ were such that Boyes was obliged to leave his wife and two sons and withdraw to Coutances in Normandy. Here he discovered further landscapes reminiscent of Claude, and indeed one of his most successful efforts in that style, Coutances 1823 , dates from this time. He could not prevail upon his wife to join him, so it was alone and in a mood of desolation that Boyes made the first entry in his voluminous and famous diary on 17 April 1823.

Boyes’s financial and familial difficulties were resolved shortly afterwards by another financial debacle—in the New South Wales Commissariat. There a substantial defalcation by the head of the commissariat had led to the establishment of a new department to prevent the recurrence of such derelictions. Boyes, who had achieved and was to sustain a good reputation as a meticulous accountant, was ordered on active service and posted to the newly separated auditorial accounts division under the direction of Assistant Commissary-General William Lithgow. He was in no position in 1823 to refuse this posting, but in accepting it Boyes intended only a brief separation from his family, imagining they would soon join him in Australia. In the event they were parted for nine years, a separation which yielded for posterity Boyes’s rich harvest of letters home which are a vivid evocation of his cultural reaction to the new country and its landscape.

In December 1823 Boyes arrived at Hobart Town as a passenger in the convict transport Sir Godfrey Webster . He stayed briefly in Van Diemen’s Land where, like other colonial artists after him, he found such settings as hitherto 'were to be found nowhere but in the imagination of the painter’. He was then posted to Sydney where initially he was repulsed by the 'stunted, ragged and frightful’ appearance of the trees, again echoing the reaction of painters and immigrants before and after him. Shortly after his arrival Boyes announced his intention of giving a 'systematic account of this place’ both in his letters and in watercolour; 'in the meantime I have plenty of subjects for the pencil … and am most busily employed in getting some sketches ready for England’.

In his letters, which supplement his growing diary, there is an invaluable account of the early colonies, while his watercolours of the period, such as Mt. Nelson 1823 and On the Grounds of D’Arrietta Esq, Morton Park. February 1824 , show a remarkable adaptation to the Australian landscape within a few days of arrival in the country. In Sydney, Boyes was also treasurer of a committee formed in November 1825 to commission a portrait of Governor Brisbane by the roving artist Augustus Earle . While there are no references to Earle in Boyes’s surviving letters and diaries, perhaps it is possible to detect some trace of Earle’s romantic landscapes in his paintings, particularly his cliffscapes of the scarps and contours of Mount Wellington in Van Diemen’s Land.

Boyes was posted to Van Diemen’s Land as its colonial auditor in October 1826. He had always preferred its landscape to that of New South Wales and, indeed, it was here that he made his major contribution to Australian art, although it is arguable whether this lay more in his writing than his painting. Perhaps the colonial reviewer was too severe when he wrote, over 40 years after Boyes’s death, that 'He seems to have so revelled in the delight of seeing the beautiful and in the wonderful facility that he possessed of rapid delineation and interpretation of Nature’s most fugitive phases, that instead of making any of his sketches into a picture, he preferred recording any new impression his sensitive eye received’. Nevertheless, it is true that most of Boyes’s work shows delicate promise rather than substantial achievement and, with some notable exceptions, indicates a lack of fulfilment. He acknowledged this himself in his diary when lamenting his inadequacy in 'the task of putting the forms on paper … of a most beautiful sky such as would have established a man’s fame for ever to paint’, or when he quoted John Glover’s opinion in 1831 that 'industry must make me a great artist here’.

Although Boyes’s work had its limitations, it was supplemented in a very real sense by his diary which not only contains evocative 'pen pictures’ of the antipodean landscape as he saw and tried to capture it but invaluable commentaries on other colonial artists, their work and their techniques of painting. He is particularly enlightening on Glover, whose influence is seen in Jamestown St. Helena, 1832 , as well as on Bock , Skinner Prout and Simpkinson , among many, and his diary abounds with details of great historical value, even to listing the mix of colours he and other artists used.

Boyes returned to England in 1832 on leave of absence to re-unite himself with his family after a separation of nine years. There he busied himself with art matters, conferring particularly with Shayer and making numerous technical notes on his work, as well as taking examples for circulation and copying among fellow Van Diemen’s Land artists such as Thomas Bock. He brought his wife and four sons to Van Diemen’s Land in 1834, in the convict transport Moffat , and resumed his colonial auditorship. He was appointed legislative councillor in 1840. Under the administration of Sir John Franklin he was made colonial secretary in 1842-43, appointed in the place of Montagu who was dismissed by Franklin for insubordination. Thus Boyes was second only to the governor and able to exercise his influence on behalf of art in the colony.

His close association with his successor as colonial secretary, J.E. Bicheno , led to the formation of a sketching group which included the Colonial Treasurer and amateur painter Peter Fraser and Bishop Francis Russell Nixon , a remarkable aggregation of 'Art and Government’ in Van Diemen’s Land. Their informal Sketching Club included such major colonial artists as Simpkinson de Wesselow and John Skinner Prout, and Boyes’s diary has much useful detail of their activities. While Boyes and Bicheno also indulged their joint musical enthusiasms by promoting soirées and instrument quartettes, undoubtedly their most important cultural alliance was in the promotion of the Hobart Town Art Exhibition of January 1845 – regarded as the first Fine Art exhibition in Australia – at which Boyes exhibited Cottage Scene, after S. Prout .

Boyes retained his colonial auditorship to the end, discharging meticulously and honourably that duty which Governor Arthur had deemed one of the most 'laborious and responsible’ in the colony. He also maintained his pursuit of art, continuing his watercolour painting until his last weeks. One of his last diary entries is rich with evocative colour in the reporting of a local event. Over a period of 30 years, in his painting and perhaps even more in his writing, he had recorded the cultural accommodation of English immigrants to Australia and its landscape. Boyes died on 16 August 1853. He was survived by his wife, Mary, and six of their eight children.

Writers:

Chapman, Peter

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011