The Arthur Boyd we never knew
by Elizabeth Fortescue · Australian Financial ReviewElizabeth FortescueSaleroom writer
Jun 5, 2026 – 8.35am
The 20 huge Arthur Boyd tapestries that will be seen all together for the first time at Canberra’s National Gallery of Australia (NGA) this month are an astonishing feat of artistry and craftsmanship. That they exist at all is the result of a series of strange events, not the least of which is how NGA came to acquire them in 1975, some years before the gallery was officially opened.
To use a weaving analogy, if one thread in their complicated journey had been broken, they would not have been made. Australia would then have been denied arguably one of the greatest artistic feats by a towering art figure. And 50 years later, an NGA curator would not have travelled to Portugal to find a hilltop tapestry workshop with a cornucopia of carefully preserved archival material, some of which will also be on display in Canberra.
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Elizabeth FortescueSaleroom writerElizabeth Fortescue writes the Saleroom column and about the visual arts. She was previously arts editor at The Daily Telegraph and is Australia correspondent for The Art Newspaper.
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