Artists

Robert Goodman was born in Taplow in Buckinghamshire in 1871. He moved with his family to the Cape in 1886 where he attended lessons with JS Morland, the first president of the South African Society of Artists. With Morland’s financial help, the young Goodman continued his training at the Académie Julian in Paris from 1895, before basing himself in London in 1897. He travelled frequently during this period, mainly to the Continent, but also to India and back to South Africa occasionally, where he recorded scenes from the Anglo-Boer War front. He chose to adopt the name Gwelo in the hope of standing out in the London art scene and subsequently signed his work with his now famous ‘RGG’ monogram.

Goodman returned to Cape Town permanently in 1915 and produced a series of works focused on Cape Homesteads, of which the illustrations for Dorothea Fairbridge’s Historic Houses of South Africa, published in 1922, were only a small part. Although he never received formal training in architecture, Goodman’s interest in Cape vernacular architecture and his work alongside Ivan Mitford-Barberton enabled him to play a major role in the so-called Cape Dutch Revival in South Africa, and many of his renovations, adaptations and designs had a lasting impact.

Goodman is undoubtedly one of the country’s most accomplished painters, and a stand-out pastelist. Immersive and memorable paintings of Cape Dutch façades in dappled light, Drakensberg streams, quiet interiors and still lifes, all typically animated with short, flickering strokes of pure colour, mark out a prolific and impressive career. Major private collections inevitably have choice examples, and few local state institutions are without noteworthy ‘Gwelos’ in their survey holdings.