Suite of Rare Early Wildlife Drawings by William Kentridge from the Engen Collection poised to go under the hammer at Strauss & Co

11 Nov 2025

In 1985, approaching 30, William Kentridge was commissioned to produce a suite of wildlife drawings for energy company Mobil’s new Cape Town headquarters, designed by architect Louis Karol. The suite of 15 drawings he delivered, now part ofthe Engen Collection, reveal Kentridge’s remarkable skill as a draughtsman. By turns illustrative, humorous, melancholic, surreal and possibly even prophetic in the case of his composition featuring an overturned rhino, they also demonstrate his deft handling of a subject matter often prone to cliché. 

The drawings derive from transformative period in Kentridge’s early career. In 1984, at the prompting of dealer Reinhold Cassirer, a family friend, Kentridge returned to the studio following a long absence. In a 2012 lecture series at Harvard University, Kentridge likened the experience of being a young artist back in the studio to Rainer Maria Rilke’s descriptions of a weary panther circling its enclosure in his poem The Panther (1902).¹ The lecture series is rich in animal references, both real and artistic. 

In the manner of the drawings in the Engen Collection, Kentridge’s drawings from 1984 and 1985 often incorporated charcoal, pastel, crayon, gouache and/or ink. Thematically, Kentridge was interested in human rather than animal behaviour but his compositions often feature animal subjects. The Conservationists’ Ball, a triptych shown in the 1985 Cape Town Triennale, incorporates a cheetah, a rhino, a spotted hyena, an unspecified fish and various animal carcases. Also from 1985, The Boating Party, a triptych based on Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party(1881), includes a woman hugging a warthog. Briefly an editorial cartoonist for the Weekly Mail newspaper in 1985, Kentridge signed his cartoons as “PH Chere” – an allusion to the French noun for warthog, phacochère.²

Animals, both land and sea dwelling, continued to appear in Kentridge’s drawingsthroughout the 1980s. The dark tones and polemical bite of these drawings reflected the strong influence of Goya, Daumier and the German expressionists. However, Kentridge’s appreciation for animal subjects, and his accomplished execution of them for the Mobil commission, points to other guiding influences. Kentridge was six when he was gifted Cecil Skotnes’ 1960 woodblock print of a striped cat with arched back and menacing claws. Two profile-cut sculptures atop the motorised gate at his Johannesburg home continue to signal the influence of this formative work.

Notwithstanding their neo-expressionist handling, Kentridge’s wildlife drawings have a basis in academic drawing. Kentridge was 12 when he met artist and educator Bill Ainslie at his family home.³ He first attended his art classes as a high school boy. In 1976, after completing his studies in politics and African studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, Kentridge enrolled in Ainslie’s Johannesburg Art Foundation, a non-racial private art school, where he studied until 1978. Ainslie’s classes involved rigorous academic teaching, including life drawing classes – but no animal subjects, adds Kentridge.⁴ For his research towards this commission Kentridge consulted the great South African library of books on wildlife. Their transformation here is uniquely his own.

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Johannesburg Flagship Week 2025

Join the Art Specialist team on Saturday the 15^th & 16^th November at 11am for an in-depth exploration of the art and artists featured in the Johannesburg November 2025