Notes

Appointed Assistant Land-Surveyor at Vrede soon after his arrival from Germany in 1898, Erich Mayer joined a Boer commando at the outbreak of the Anglo-Boer War. Captured by British forces as the Siege of Mafeking was lifted, the artist boarded the prisoner train to Cape Town in June 1900, bound for the guarded, Deadwood Camp on the Island of St Helena. Mayer and his fellow prisoners arrived in Jamestown late that June, joining the already considerable number of Boer men confined to the rows of sagging military tents and makeshift shacks. Typically, Mayer wasted little time recording the conditions, characters and events around him, always in his small-scale, charming and straightforward style.

Bearing in mind the island’s barren landscapes that Mayer more often than not depicted, one can only guess at the location of the makeshift campsite in the present lot, or indeed the ghost-like figures. But as the artist was only repatriated to Germany in the December of 1902, there is no doubt that the work was painted on St Helena. For this reason it has huge topographical and historical significance, of course, but it also falls into the impressive and largely overlooked tradition of South African wartime pictures.