Artist Database

Moses Tladi was South Africa’s first black landscape painter in the traditional, realist mode. He was educated at Lobethal Mission in the then Northern Transvaal but moved to Johannesburg in the 1920s in search of work. While employed as a gardener, he began painting. In 1931 he was the first black South African artist to exhibit formally at the Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town. Despite serving in the military during WWII, in 1956, as a consequence of the apartheid regime’s Native Resettlement Act of 1954, Tladi was forced to move from his small holding in the ‘white’ Johannesburg suburb of Kensington B – and his much-loved garden and orchard – to the rapidly growing ‘black’ township of Soweto south of Johannesburg.

In Tladi’s signature gentle approach to the landscape, the light is golden, the air still, and the scene closely and affectionately observed. As he produced such a small body of work, and as the majority remain part of the artist’s estate, examples appear on the market only rarely.