Sotheby's grooms Arthur Boyd work for $1.2m sale

SOTHEBY'S Australia hopes to defy the flat art market and fetch a record $1.2 million at auction for a rare Arthur Boyd painting.

Arthur Boyd's 'The Frightened Bridegroom'

SOTHEBY'S Australia hopes to defy the flat art market and fetch a record $1.2 million at auction for a rare Arthur Boyd painting from the artist's Bridegroom series.

The mid-sized board, The Frightened Bridegroom, will go under the hammer at Sotheby's Important Australian and International Art auction in Sydney on August 23, one of a tight, 67-lot sale that includes an etching by the late Lucian Freud.

"The market right now for icons is there," Sotheby's chairman, Geoffrey Smith, said.

Despite the famous Boyd family name, works by the artist, who died in 1999, do not generally achieve the top prices collectors pay for artists such as Sidney Nolan and Brett Whiteley.

But Mr Smith said the provenance and rarity of this work should ensure it broke the record of $1.1m, including buyer's premium, paid at Christies in 2001 for Boyd's Bridegroom Waiting for His Bride to Grow Up.

The auction estimate for the latest work is $1m to $1.2m, on top of which the successful buyer would pay a 20 per cent buyer's premium.

"For Boyd, the Bridegroom series is like the Ned Kelly series for Nolan. They are the holy grail," Mr Smith said.

Last year, Nolan's First-Class Marksman fetched an Australian record of $5.4m at auction and triggered a flurry of interest in other Nolan works.

Mr Smith said the picture, which depicts an Aboriginal man, possibly a returned serviceman, and a white bride, represented the complexities of indigenous and non-indigenous Australia.

The Frightened Bridegroom was originally bought by Melbourne rag trader and art collector Bruce Wenzel on the opening night of an exhibition in 1958 at Australian Galleries.

The show featured 15 major paintings from what has come to be considered Boyd's best series.

"One was destroyed in a fire," Mr Smith said. "It was pretty harrowing. It was called The Escaped Bride, and you could say it got away."

Of the others, the National Gallery of Victoria bought one, Canberra's National Gallery acquired one about a decade ago and the Art Gallery of South Australia owns one that was once owned by Robert Helpmann.

The Frightened Bridegroom was used as the cover art for the 1972 edition of Thomas Keneally's The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith and it is the trophy painting of the coming Sotheby's auction.

Freud's Woman with an Arm Tattoo has an estimate of $60,000 to $80,000 and will test the market as the first work for public sale following the death of the British artist last month.