Notes

This late work, painted when George Pemba was 77 and formerly owned by artist and teacher Diane McLean, records Pemba’s life-long interest in domestic routines, communal rites and urban customs, including grooming. A consummate draftsman, Pemba’s sketchbooks feature many studies rehearsing these themes. A technically accomplished oil painter, his mature output from the 1950s onwards combined the stylistic influences of seventeenth-century Dutch naturalism with nineteenth-century British narrative painting and early French modernism, including realism and impressionism. His oils ranged from detailed studies characterised by their fastidious brushwork to more loosely described works rehearsing an impression, such as this lot. Common throughout is his “directness, unembellished honesty, strength of draughtsmanship and composition and observational ability.”¹ Difficulties working in the socially volatile circumstances of the late 1980s, coupled with his advanced age, did not blunt Pemba’s enthusiasm for depicting scenes from life. The late 1980s saw Pemba achieve wider national acclaim that culminated in a monograph and retrospective exhibition, both in 1996. Writing in the catalogue for the latter, art historian Jacqueline Nolte rightly observes that Pemba’s best work is characterised by “a quietude which overrules all possible ruptures”.² Stillness and calm pervade this feminine scene of personal care involving a youth and her elder.

^1. Quoted in Hayden Proud (ed) (1996) George Milwa Mnyaluza Pemba, Cape Town, SouthAfrican National Gallery, page 40.
^2. Ibid.

Provenance

Collection of Diane McLean, Buhrmannsdrif, North West, 1996.

Stephan Welz & Co, Johannesburg, 18 April 2005, lot 91. 

The Oliver Powell and Timely Investments Trust Collection.

Exhibited

South African National Gallery, Cape Town, George Pemba Retrospective, 27 April to 28 July 1996, listed as number 111 on page 86 of exhibition catalogue.

Literature

Sarah Hudleston (1996) Against all Odds — George Pemba: His Life and Works, Johannesburg: Jonothan Ball Publishers, illustrated in colour on page 195.