Notes

Laubser returned to South Africa from Europe in 1924 and over the next decade produced at least eight paintings of Ou Booi, the shepherd on the family farm Oortmanspos near Klipheuwel in the Cape, as well as several preliminary studies in various sketchbooks now in the University of Stellenbosch archives. 

I almost forgot one of the most important farm characters –
Ou Booi, the Boesman who was our shepherd. He told me many stories of the pioneering life in Bloemfontein, where he came from. (I had a great respect for the odd dignity of Ou Booi, with his multi-coloured patched pants, his green worn overcoat and ostrich feather in his hat. You often come across Ou Booi as he was my model on several occasions.¹

While the visual language is clearly heavily influenced by her contact with German Expressionism and European modernism, with modelling through slabs of colour, simplified planes and bold forms, Laubser invokes here the iconographic language of the picturesque.  Laubser emphasizes a nostalgic recollection of Ou Booi’s appealingly dilapidated appearance. In this work Ou Booi’s appearance has been enlivened, with two colourful peacock plumes replacing a somewhat drab monochromatic ostrich feather and the bright red scarf framing the weather-beaten lined face with dramatic intensity.

A work like this which is clearly of a specific sitter who is named, shows a greater intimacy and connection (albeit in the context of a familial landowner-labourer relationship) than the later portraits of either faceless women or representations in which ethnic markers often give a sense of the exotic.

1 From ‘Dit is my Kontrei’ unpublished 5-page transcript for radio talk on the Afrikaans Service of the SABC; 21 February 1956 (translated from the Afrikaans).

Elizabeth Delmont, 2017

We are grateful to Elizabeth Delmont, author of a dissertation on the early works of Maggie Laubser, published by Perskor in 1994, Maggie Laubser: her paintings, drawings and graphics, compiled by Dalene Marais, for this catalogue entry.

Provenance

Mr and Mrs CW Malan, Cape Town.

Mr J van N Joubert, Patensie, Cape.

Stephan Welz & Co in Association with Sotheby's, Johannesburg, 6 May 1996, lot 230, with the title The Old Shepherd.

Private Collection.

Literature

Dalene Marais. (1994) Maggie Laubser: her paintings, drawings and graphics, Johannesburg and Cape Town: Perskor. Illustrated on page 211, catalogue number 685, with the titles Portrait of an Old Man with Hat and Walking Stick; Landscape with Tree and Sheep in Background.