Notes

Thanks to Professor Kevin Balkwill, School of Animal, Plant and Environmental Sciences, University of the Witwatersrand, for assistance with cataloguing this lot.

A startlingly beautiful watercolour study by Henk Pierneef appeared in Strauss & Co’s Cape Town saleroom in March 2017 (Lot 373, fig 1). Executed in May 1948, defined by the artist’s careful, economic drawing, and enlivened by flashes of orange, green and yellow, this landscape near Lydenburg unfolded in grassy patches and segmented fields towards blue, distant mountains. In the centre of its composition, standing tall, still and lank, were two imposing, unmistakable pawpaw trees. How wonderful, now, that the present lot, the magnificent conclusion of the study, has come to light. Much larger and worked up in oils on canvas, the painting is as dramatic as it is assured, and shows the artist at his latter-career peak. But the painting is also unusual as it replicates the early watercolour study so precisely. While the artist sketched obsessively in the veld throughout his career, whatever studies he produced he tended to transform back in the studio into more stylised, decorative, and monumental versions of the original scene. Marone, District Lydenburg was painted at a time when Pierneef’s reputation was riding high. He exhibited frequently in the mid-1940s, sold well, lectured continuously, and remained on numerous selection committees. He took a major show to Cape Town in the beginning of 1947, produced enough work thereafter to mount a large exhibition in the Transvaler Bookshop in Johannesburg later that year, and even contributed ‘a beautiful end-paper’ for the 25 private and leather-bound guides given to King George and his retinue during the visit of the Royal Family. Early in 1948, moreover, he sold 12 paintings of old Pretoria scenes to the SA Railways and Harbours for £500. He would have felt content, then, presumably, not to mention flush, while spending time on the farm of his friends Dr and Mrs Rossouw near Lydenburg that May. The wide vista he chose to paint for his hosts is Edenic: crisp air and commanding mountains under a stirring cloudscape. The farmlands in the mid-ground, like a neat quilt of vermilion and emerald green, add a decorative band of colour across the composition, and recall some of the major, Fauve-inspired canvases that the artist unveiled after his watershed trip to Europe between July 1925 and February 1926 (fig 2).

Provenance

Acquired from the artist by Dr and Mrs Roussouw and thence by descent.