Notes

Frans Oerder Kunswerkkatalogus (2017) Pretoria: The South African Academy for Science and Art, illustrated in colour on page 53, Fig. 182 (Berede Koloniale Soldaat).

Frans Oerder’s first decade on the Highveld was unsettled. Having arrived from Rotterdam in 1890, with a rigorous and traditional Dutch training already behind him, the artist found sporadic and tedious work with the Zuid-Afrikaansche Spoorweg Maatschappij and the firm De Wyn & Engelenburg, before taking up a teaching position at the Staatsmeisjesskool in Pretoria. Ever-close to his countryman Anton van Wouw, and an early mentor for an eager Henk Pierneef, the artist began producing pictures that studied the Transvaal light, the severity of the local landscape – particularly in winter – and the gentle rhythm of agriculture on the outskirts of town.

Thanks to his professional standing and his political sympathies, Oerder was made an official war artist by President Paul Kruger in 1899. Although captured by the British in 1900, and interned on Meintjeskop, Oerder produced a priceless visual account of the war, recorded mainly on paper, through both Boer and British characters: men at times apprehensive, exhausted, distinguished, steadfast, alert or at rest. The majority of this archive remains under institutional care, split in the main between the University of Pretoria, the Anglo-Boer War Museum in Bloemfontein, and Museum Africa. Examples in private hands, particularly in oil, are increasingly rare. The present lot shows a heavily-moustached British soldier on his bay mount: dressed in khaki frock coat and Stohwasser gaiters, with his heels down in the stirrups and his blanket rolled on his thighs, he strikes an air of hard-earned experience. Oerder captures everything quickly and expressively, with the buttery yellow and mustard in the background a real highlight.