inner city where he was influenced by his contact with European refugees. Reflecting this move in the late 1930s, his work moved into a distinct period of depictions of fanciful characters in urban settings. Career Military service Boyd (Service number V101720) was 20 when conscripted to serve in the militia from 12 May 1941 until 25 March 1944. Initially serving with the 2nd Cavalry Division, which later became the 2nd Armoured Division (Australia), Boyd was transferred to the 4th Division (Australia) for full time service, and then Army Headquarters Cartography Company. Boyd predominantly served in the Bendigo area as a Cartographer. With the perspective of his own lived experience of service, Boyd's expressionistic wartime paintings, including images of cripples and those deemed unfit for war service, were considered painful images of the dispossessed and the outcast. Artistic career Following the war, Boyd, together with John Perceval founded a workshop at Murrumbeena and turned his hand to what he since childhood had seen his father's hands occupied with, pottery. Later came ceramic painting and sculpture. Although Boyd was the closest of friends with Albert Tucker, Joy Hester and Sidney Nolan and the art patrons John and Sunday Reed, the modernist Heide Circle and its hierarchical structure did not beckon him overtly as his position in the Boyd family gave him the fullest identity in itself. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Boyd traveled to Victoria's Wimmera country and to Central Australia including Alice Springs and his work turned towards landscape paintings. During this period, perhaps his best-known work comes from his Love, Marriage and Death of a Half-Caste Bride series of 31 paintings, also known as The Bride, that imagined an Aboriginal person of mixed descent as a neglected outsider. First exhibited in Melbourne in April 1958, the series met a mixed reaction, as it did later that year in Adelaide and Sydney. Following the 1999 acquisition of Reflected Bride 1 by the National Gallery of Australia, the gallery's director Brian Kennedy commented in 2002: In 1956, Boyd's ceramic sculpture 'Olympic Pylon' was installed in the forecourt of the Melbourne Olympic Swimming Pool. Relocates to Europe Boyd represented Australia with Arthur Streeton at the Venice Biennale in 1958, where his Bride series was well received. He was affiliated with the Antipodeans, a group of painters founded in 1959 and supported by Australian art historian Bernard Smith, who tried to promote