Notes

Extensive Landscape, Lydenburg was produced in the same year Pierneef completed his definitive ‘Station Panel’ commission.¹ The strong colours of the foreground vegetation and cumulonimbus clouds above suggest Summer months – early or late 1932. By November 1932, this painting was included in his exhibition of new work displayed at the Pretoria firm, Norman Spencer. Unusually, he chose to hand-make all the frames for the works in this show, each “about 160mm wide, almost flat and painted in a dull, light blue shade. The frames had an almost invisible line of colour in the middle, picking out the dominant colour in the painting.”² The current lot includes this original frame, highlighting the dominant blue shade of the painting’s distant mountains.

Pierneef’s “quest for harmony and order” is manifest in the synthesis of colour and form between the rugged detail of the foreground slopes and the silent isolation of the vast farmed plains beyond, crowned by the distant mountains and billowing clouds above. Esmé Berman explains: “Pierneef projects the feeling that the structure of the landscape is the expression of a grand primordial design. He has analysed its elements in search of underlying logic…the individual natural features cease to be regarded as mere data of the landscape; they become units of the pictorial architecture and each contributes to the stability of the composition.”³

While the intermontane valley suggests farming activity, the foreground vegetation consists of Lydenburg Montane Grassland, the invasive Prickly Pear (Opuntia ficus-indica), the small trees and shrubs could be introduced Eucalyptus species, White Stinkwood (Celtis africana) and smaller indigenous shrubs such as the Bloughwarrie (Euclea crispa) and Wildesalie (Buddleja salviifolia).⁴

¹ 28 paintings of natural scenes and historical places in Southern Africa which were to serve as huge murals, and a further 4 smaller studies of indigenous trees, to decorate the newly built Johannesburg railway station
² Nel, P.G. (ed.). JH Pierneef: His life and his work. Perskor Publishers, Cape Town and Johannesburg, 1990, page 80
³ Berman, Esmé. The Story of South African Painting. A. A. Balkema, Cape Town and Rotterdam, 1974, page 39
⁴ Vegetation and location information courtesy of Ernst van Jaarsveld, Botanist and Horticulturist at Kirstenbosch National Botanical Gardens