Historical information

Built by noted artist Theodore Penleigh Boyd, father of architect Robin Boyd.

Covered under National Estate, National Trust of Australia (Victoria) Local Significance and Heritage Overlay, Nillumbik Planning Scheme.

Published: Nillumbik Now and Then /​ Marguerite Marshall 2008; photographs Alan King with Marguerite Marshall.; p111

The Robins at Warrandyte,* was once home to a member of a famous family and is also one of the first reinforced concrete houses in Victoria.
The builder, Theodore Penleigh Boyd, born in 1890, was a talented painter1 noted for his works of the Warrandyte bush. He was the father of architect Robin Boyd, author of the Australian Ugliness and the uncle of painter, Arthur Boyd. Penleigh Boyd’s great grandfather was Sir William A’Beckett, Victoria’s first Chief Justice.
Penleigh Boyd is considered by some to be an ‘unsung hero’ overshadowed by more famous members of his family. Mornington Gallery Director Andrea May said many believed Boyd ‘had never received the national acclaim that he deserved’.2
Classified by the National Trust3 and part of the Australian National Heritage,4 The Robins is set well back near the end of Kangaroo Ground – Warrandyte Road, unobserved by passers-by. Built in 1913, The Robins has some Art Nouveau influences and is a descendant of the Queen Anne style. It is covered in stucco and has a prominent attic, which Boyd used as a studio. Some parts of the house are up to 33 centimetres thick and built in part with pisé (rammed earth) and in part with reinforced concrete.
Amazingly, Boyd built The Robins without an accessible driveway, and only a narrow track along which he had to cart building materials. The journey was uphill and Boyd terraced the land with Warrandyte rock5 without the aid of machinery.
At only 33 years, Boyd was killed in a car accident in 1923. He was buried in Brighton near the home of his parents.
Several people have since owned the house, including political journalist, Owen Webster.
Boyd was born at Penleigh House, Wiltshire, and studied at Haileybury College, Melbourne and The Hutchins School, Hobart. He attended the Melbourne National Gallery School and in his final year exhibited at the Victorian Artists’ Society. He arrived in London in 1911 and his painting Springtime was hung at the Royal Academy. He painted in several studios in England and then worked in Paris.6
There he met painter Phillips Fox through whom he met artists of the French modern school and also his wife-to-be, Edith Anderson, whom he married in Paris in 1912.
After touring France and Italy, the couple returned to Melbourne. In 1913 Boyd held an exhibition and won second prize in the Federal Capital site competition, then the Wynne Prize for landscape in 1914.
In 1915 Boyd joined the Australian Imperial Force, and became a sergeant in the Electrical and Mechanical Mining Company. However he was severely gassed at Ypres and invalided to England.
In 1918 in London Boyd published Salvage, writing the text and illustrating it with 20 black-and-white ink-sketches of army scenes.
Later that year he returned to Melbourne, and, despite suffering from the effects of gas, he held several successful one-man shows, quickly selling his water-colour and oil paintings.
In his short career Penleigh Boyd was recognized as one of Australia’s finest landscape painters. He loved colour, having been influenced early by Turner and McCubbin. His works are in all Australian state galleries, the National Collection in Canberra as well as in regional galleries.7
His wife Edith was also an artist having studied at the Slade School, London, and in Paris with Phillips Fox. After her marriage she continued to paint and excelled in drawing. In later years she wrote several dramas, staged by repertory companies, and radio plays for the Australian Broadcasting Commission, in which she took part. She was the model for the beautiful red-haired woman in several of Phillips Fox’s paintings and the family hold three of his portraits of her.
*Possibly named after the Aboriginal words warran, meaning ‘object’ and dyte, meaning ‘thrown at’.

Significance

This collection of almost 130 photos about places and people within the Shire of Nillumbik, an urban and rural municipality in Melbourne's north, contributes to an understanding of the history of the Shire. Published in 2008 immediately prior to the Black Saturday bushfires of February 7, 2009, it documents sites that were impacted, and in some cases destroyed by the fires. It includes photographs taken especially for the publication, creating a unique time capsule representing the Shire in the early 21st century. It remains the most recent comprehenesive publication devoted to the Shire's history connecting local residents to the past.

Physical description

Born digital image file