Persecuted Lovers is Arthur Boyd’s scathing comment on the treatment of Aboriginals in Australia.

The subject of persecuted lovers has been handled beautifully by the likes of Jacques-Louis David, but none have tackled the subject quite like Arthur Boyd. Persecuted Lovers is not a romantic tale you can enjoy on some rainy, lonely afternoon. It’s a blistering image of a country that did wrong (so, so wrong) to an indigenous community. 

It began in 1953, when Boyd witnessed the segregation of the Aboriginals from the white inhabitants in Central Australia. Boyd took a trip from Alice Springs through the Simpson Desert, where he witnessed the abhorrent treatment of the indigenous community. This was long before Insta stories were around, back when Australia looked like a Mad Max movie set, and everything was dry and red and dusty. Boyd was appalled by the government’s violent attempts to push the indigenous people out of town. The white Australians even considered the mix-raced people a threat to society. It is, sadly, a very ‘Australian thing’ to do to indigenous communities, to forcibly push them far out of town so that the white people would not have to engage with them.

Persecuted Lovers stands as part of Boyd’s Love, Marriage and Death of a Half-Caste series, which is also known as the Brides series. The series of paintings, completed between 1957 and 1960, consists of 30-40 works that highlight these kinds of assaults on indigenous people. Inspiration for the series came when Boyd saw, in Central Australia, Aboriginal women riding a truck whilst wearing wedding dresses. 

There is a smaller study of Persecuted Lovers that’s somewhat different from the final painting. Instead of wearing a glowing white dress fit for a bride, the red-haired woman in the study is naked. Some have guessed that Boyd deliberately clothed the woman so that 1950s viewers didn’t freak out. The gunman is also slightly different in the study, looking more like a dark silhouette slinking through the night, rather than an armed man, quite visible in his suit and hat. The study also shows how Boyd experimented with composition before settling on what we see now in Persecuted Lovers. It’s a rare treat to see a study by Boyd as he rarely made them, even for major works.