Notes

Having left the State Library in 1917, and having taught at the the Heidelberg Normal College for more that a year, Pierneef decided in the winter of 1919 to dedicate all his efforts to his painting career. Facing financial pressure, he began producing more large-format paintings, landscapes inevitably, that appealed to the admittedly small art-buying market. Painted more often than not on thick-weave canvases, many of these early oils are characterised by distant and sweeping views, charged skies, agitated brushstrokes, and lonely trees or landmasses as focal points. Painted in 1920, the current lot was a commission for the Zeerust minister HW Ziervogel, and presented in the October of that year. Below the local outcrop, which an increasingly confident Pierneef lit up with flecks of orange, yellow and violet, a canopy of coppery treetops dissects the composition. In the foreground, beyond rustling grasses, is a riverbed, streaked through with swipes of blue and dull pink.