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Boyd's narrative cycles more often come out of the Old Testament. Outstanding among them, in the '60s, was a series about Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian king whose pride set him up against God and who was punished by seven years' expulsion to the wilderness. The paintings radiate a sort of excruciating rage, as the King mutates into a toadlike beast, is threatened by lions or -- in the most striking image of all -- flies wrapped in flame over the charred tree trunks of a recognizably Australian forest. Boyd was living in London when he painted them, and Nebuchadnezzar on fire is clearly related to the acts of self-immolation by protesters against the Vietnam War.
The narratives change in Boyd's work, but the landscape endures, whether broadly generalized or seen and set down with minute care, tree by tree. Since the 19th century, primal landscape has been as important to the history of Australian art as to American, and Boyd is one of its main exponents, moving between its two main stereotypes: as hostile wilderness, seen as desert or dark wood, and as lyrical Eden. His '80s paintings of Pulpit Rock on a river south of Sydney are of the second kind. This hill with its fallen slabs of gray rock, a low tusk of the earth changing in the light and doubled in the water, has become the Mont Sainte-Victoire of Boyd's old age, and paintings % like Mid-Day, Pulpit Rock, 1983, are a fitting capstone to one of the most fecund careers in modern landscape painting.