Notes

While exhibiting in Stellenbosch in 1921, Pierneef met Hans Aschenborn, the German-trained artist who had settled in South West Africa in 1909. Aschenborn spoke passionately about the landscape of his adopted country, and along with Toon van den Heever, the judge-poet, convinced Pierneef to visit there in April 1923. Having by then painted predominately on the Highveld, and only more recently in the Cape, the South West African landscape, with its uninterrupted horizons, dramatic shadows, pristine isolation and, most memorably, its rare, startling light, left a deep impression on Pierneef. Inspired, he produced enough painted landscapes and linocuts to hold an exhibition in Windhoek in that June, and made sure to return the following year too. While he revisited his initial South West African visions throughout his career (perhaps most famously in the Karibib and Okahandja panels for the Johannesburg Railway Station), the pictures from his first two trips in 1923 and 1924 are often singled out as some of his most indelible, beautiful and intimate. The present lot is a distant view of the Brandberg range in the then Damaraland. The cloudscape above is an extraordinary example of one of the artist’s favourite themes, but it is the colour of the mountains – the rich, uniquely-charged lilac-pink the sun turns the earth at dusk – that makes the picture so special.