Arthur Boyd’s St Francis Tapestries : Looking at the Marks Behind the Story

Recently I visited the National Gallery of Australia to look at Arthur Boyd’s St Francis tapestries, but, I found myself looking at the drawings as much as the finished works.

Arthur Boyd: Tapestries brings together all 20 of Boyd’s Life of St Francis tapestries for the first time. Woven between 1970 and 1974 in collaboration with the Portuguese tapestry workshop Manufactura de Tapeçarias de Portalegre, they are enormous – each approximately 2.5 by 3.4 metres. Their scale is impressive, but it was the marks within that attracted my eye.

Arthur Boyd and St Francis

Arthur Boyd (1920–1999) is one of Australia’s most significant twentieth-century artists. He worked across painting, drawing, ceramics and printmaking and is perhaps best known for his expressive figurative paintings and landscapes. His interest in St Francis of Assisi was a long one and following a visit to Italy in 1964, the subject became increasingly important. Boyd used the stories about St Francis to explore ideas about spirituality, suffering, nature, relationships and the human condition.

Look at the drawings

The exhibition includes pastels, lithographs and drawings alongside the tapestries. Boyd was a prolific and energetic draughtsman. The National Gallery holds hundreds of Boyd’s drawings. At least 70 of these relate directly to the development of his St Francis imagery.
These aren’t necessarily careful preparatory drawings in the way we sometimes imagine a preliminary sketch to be. Boyd’s drawings appear to have been made quickly with repeated marks, and scratchy lines that frequently change direction. Figures emerge from the energetic strokes rather than from a carefully constructed outline.

I saw this mark making as thinking. The lines he drew were not just describing something that Boyd already knew he wanted to draw. I sensed that the act of drawing was part of finding the image.

We can become rather obsessed with making a “good drawing”, in a precious sketchbook. However Boyd’s drawings reminded me that a drawing is part of a process.
It can be a place to search and ask a question. A few quick lines can be enough to decide: Yes, this is going somewhere – or frustratingly – No, abandon that idea. The National Gallery describes these drawings as lively and often made at speed. You can see that with several marks made that was enough for Boyd to decide whether an image should be developed or abandoned.


Moving from Boyd’s drawings to the finished tapestries is fascinating because the original marks were never simply reproduced. Boyd initially developed the St Francis imagery through pastel drawings and lithographs. The tapestries were then commissioned from Manufactura de Tapeçarias de Portalegre and Boyd provided the weavers with transparencies and they translated the imagery into weaving.

The finished tapestries contain between 4 and 8.5 million individual stitches each. They are more than 20 times larger than Boyd’s original source images. The change of scale changes the visual impact. A small expressive mark on paper becomes a much larger area of woven colour. Subtle shifts in a drawing have to be interpreted through the available colours and the structure of the weave. Even when the original drawing has been translated into millions of stitches, you can still feel the restless quality of his drawing.

Arthur Boyd’s St Francis Tapestries exhibition includes the weaving drawings, or cartoons, used by the Portuguese weavers. These were working documents rather than finished artworks. A photographic transparency of Boyd’s image was projected onto paper, the principal elements were drawn by hand and colours were indicated by numbers. The cartoons were then cut into horizontal sections and attached to the loom as guides for the weavers.
The process becomes visible and a reminder that a work can change as it moves between media. Perhaps that is why I found myself thinking less about “tapestry” as a separate category and more about translation. What happens to a line when it changes material?
What happens when an artist’s hand is followed by another maker’s hand?

From across the gallery, they are huge, dramatic compositions. Up close, the images dissolve into individual marks and threads. Then, as you step backwards, those marks gather themselves together again and the image returns.
That movement – close, far away, close again – feels very much like drawing.
When I sketch, I often find myself switching between looking at the whole subject and concentrating on a tiny detail. The same thing happens here. This is what I enjoyed about this exhibition. It isn’t just a collection of monumental tapestries. It is an opportunity to see an artist thinking through images.

My takeaway as a sketcher? A useful thing to remember whenever I sit down with a sketchbook is that the aim isn’t necessarily to make a beautiful drawing. Sometimes the most interesting thing you can do is simply make a mark and see where it takes you.

Exhibition details

Arthur Boyd’s St Francis Tapestries runs from June 20, 2026 to October 18, 2026 at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Free Admission
The NGA website

For more information about Arthur Boyd see the Wikipedia entry here
Or
the video on the NGA site