Since arriving in Australia William Boissevain has established a reputation as a leading painter of still life, landscape and figurative works. He has ranked in the top 25 traded Australian artists at auction for the past 15 years and is one of the few Australian painters that sells his artwork into every state in Australia.
The son of a career diplomat, Boissevain visited his mother in Perth in 1947 and decided to stay. The gentle and uncomplicated lifestyle that Western Australia offered compared most favourably to the frantic post war years of France and Greece, where he had spent the post war years broadening his experiences. The war years had been spent in England studying at Bedales School in Hampshire.
Boissevain was one of the first Western Australian painters to be able to live from the sales of his paintings, his style struck a chord with the art buying public that has remained just as strong today some six decades later.
Portraits, landscape, still life and wildlife, he is at ease with any of those subjects. His draughtsmanship is the envy of many and his sense of design is impeccable. Boissevain’s audience spans two generations and is marching steadfastly into the third.
His works are represented in, the Art Gallery of Western Australia; the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; HRH Prince of Wales Collection; the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart; the University of Western Australia; Murdoch University; Curtin University and numerous other institutional and corporate collections.