My friend Mary Boyd, later Lady Nolan, was a painter, ceramicist and photographer who became an important figure linking Australian art and British cultural life.
She was the youngest child of the artist potters Doris (nee Gough) and Merric Boyd, and grew up in Murrumbeena, near Melbourne. Her siblings all followed their parents into the family tradition as artists; Arthur and David became perhaps the best-known.
The Boyd household was a magnet for creative young people during the 1940s, including the emerging painters Sidney Nolan and John Perceval.
Unhappy at school, Mary left at 14, and in 1944, aged 18, she married Perceval. They had four children together. During this period the reputation of the group was growing steadily and becoming international. Nolan and the Boyd brothers were already established in London by the time the Perceval family moved there in early 1963, setting up household and studio in Highgate, north London.
Over the next two years, Mary developed her skills as a photographer and documented the increasingly famous generation of Australians emerging in London. In 1965 they returned to Australia when Perceval was offered a fellowship at the University of Canberra.
During the late 1960s, Perceval’s increasing alcoholism put pressure on the marriage, and Mary returned to London with her youngest daughter, Alice. By the end of the decade Mary was divorced and living in Britain with all her children. In 1975 she moved to a farmhouse in Herefordshire and was joined there in 1978 by Nolan, who was looking for a retreat after the death of his second wife, Cynthia Reed. Mary married Nolan that year.
During the 1980s, they travelled to China, Africa, Australia and America. Mary documented their travels in diaries and photographs. Her husband was knighted in 1981, and in 1983 they moved to the north of the county, settling at a 15th-century manor house and farm, The Rodd, straddling the Welsh border near Presteigne.
There Mary and Sidney converted the tithe barn into a gallery and concert space through the Sidney Nolan Trust, which they formed in 1985. After Sidney’s death in 1992, Mary devoted the rest of her life to developing the work of the trust. This included the organic farm on which they had raised a prizewinning herd of Welsh Black cattle, concerts, exhibitions and workshops, a centre for printing (using her brother Arthur’s fine presses) and annual exhibitions of Sidney’s work.
She is survived by her children with Perceval: a son, Matthew, and three daughters, Tessa, Celia and Alice, all of whom are artists.
