'Quite emotional': Renowned artist's tapestries on display after 50 years

Twenty enormous tapestries depicting the life of Saint Francis of Assisi, commissioned by artist Arthur Boyd, will be displayed at the National Gallery. While some of the tapestries have been brought out of storage in the past, the exhibition marks the first time the full suite has been hung together. What's next? The Arthur Boyd: Tapestries exhibition opens to the public on Saturday. For five decades, a collection of 20 monumental tapestries commissioned by one of Australia's most significant 20th-century artists has largely sat in storage. Arthur Boyd never saw the full series displayed before he died in 1999. For the first time, the entire collection of tapestries will finally be available to the public at the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) in Canberra. "This exhibition has been 50 years in the making," senior curator Elspeth Pitt said. "There's been a long-held ambition to display them, and we've finally after all of these years made it happen." In the late 1960s, Boyd approached a Portuguese workshop about translating his pastels depicting Saint Francis of Assisi into enormous tapestries. Between 1970 and 1974, teams of weavers at the Manufactura de Tapeçarias de Portalegre painstakingly brought his vision to life. "Each of the 20 tapestries comprises between 4 and 8 million individual stitches," Ms Pitt said. Each work measures 2.5 metres by 3.4 metres. The workshop's director, Vera Fino, said weavers worked shoulder to shoulder around the clock, adding 3 centimetres to the tapestries each day. "The weaving is all done by hand with no instruments," she said. "In some of the cases, Boyd was in a hurry to get them … which means they were done in [three, eight-hour] shifts … so the tapestries could be finished in time." Despite the NGA's efforts, the names of only some of the weavers involved at the time could be unearthed. The artist and the saint Ms Pitt said the Saint Francis tapestries were a "big undertaking" for Boyd. "He paid an equivalent sum for the works of about three quarters of a million dollars in today's money," Ms Pitt said. The medieval Italian saint was a longtime source of fascination for the artist. "It may seem strange that this Australian artist working in the middle of the 20th century was so interested in the life of this saint … but I think for Boyd, Saint Francis was a touchpoint throughout his life," Ms Pitt said. "Saint Francis, like Boyd, was an artist, a poet, an environmentalist, a pacifist. "So I think there was a resonance between these two men." The tapestries were acquired by the NGA in 1975 — seven years before the gallery opened to the public. While some of the tapestries have been brought out of storage in the past, the exhibition marks the first time the full suite has been hung together. "It is quite emotional, in a way, to be able see these works come together — and to see them in a way Arthur Boyd wasn't able to,"