Notes

Bernard Buffet’s Environs de la Rochepot (La Grande Ferme) of 1973 is a splendid rendering of a wintery farm scene in rural France. The canvas is bathed in a burst of sunlight breaking through looming dark clouds, momentarily casting a radiant golden hue across the farm. The brightly lit farmstead nestles against the deep emerald and moss tones of the hillside and in the foreground Buffet captures a winding stream, a row of stark pollarded plane trees alongside the tall and spindly trees blowing in the wind.

Buffet, a French painter born in Paris in 1928, was a precocious young talent and at the age of 15 in 1943 he was admitted to the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He had his first solo exhibition in 1947 and in 1949 at the age of 19 he was awarded the prestigious Prix de la Critique. Best known for his representational work he soon experienced a meteoric rise to celebrity status for his distinctive style of highly structured works of elongated, spiky forms, sombre colours and flattened spaces that communicated the austerity and instability of post-war Europe. Vehemently opposed to abstraction. and at a time of innovation in the contemporary, his critical acclaim eventually began to waver but there remained interest in his work.

In South Africa Buffet’s art was represented by the well-known Everard Read gallery in Johannesburg. Everard had met Buffet in Paris at the gallery of the artist’s dealer Maurice Garnier and he became good friends with the artist and his actress wife Annabel Schwob. From the early seventies with works sourced from Garnier, Everard Read held regular exhibitions showing the work of Buffet until the artist’s death in 1999.