Notes

The present lot, while never exhibited, would be instantly recognisable to Peter Clarke enthusiasts. The work is an important, monochromatic and fully-resolved precursor to the remarkable oil painting of the same title, painted a few months later in 1970, now in the holdings of the Johannesburg Art Gallery, and made famous as the cover detail and title of Philippa Hobbs and Elizabeth Rankin’s seminal monograph on the artist, Listening to Distant Thunder (2011).

The artist painted a geometricized, contemplative and touching family grouping taking shelter under a sharply-crooked and petrified tree: the sense of pathos is piercing. According to the aforementioned authors, who were led by the artist’s own recollections of conceiving the work, ‘Clarke had in mind that dramatic things were happening out there, and remembered that following political changes felt like listening to distant thunder. They produced reverberations you could not ignore. Although Clarke pointed out that he was not attempting to make overtly political statements in works such as this, he acknowledged that he was acutely conscious of the situation, with the clamour of Simon’s Town removals ongoing … With no signs of habitation or possessions, the figures seem utterly forsaken by society, a reading that no doubt prompted the alternative title the work acquired after it had left Clarke’s hands – Abandoned Family.¹

1. Philippa Hobbs and Elizabeth Rankin (2011) Listening to Distant Thunder: The Art of Peter Clarke, Johannesburg: Standard Bank Gallery, page 119.