Notes

In March 1926, Bertha Everard, her sister Edith King, and her daughter Ruth, visited Delville Wood, where a series of engagements in the Battle of the Somme had taken place during WW1. The 1st South African Infantry Brigade had been involved in the battle and suffered severe casualties. The wood was all but destroyed in the conflict and when the women visited the site ten years later, the signs were still very much in evidence. Everard returned to the battle field day after day to paint the landscape, and produced at least ten pictures that focused on the mindlessness of war made so clear by the wounded earth in front of her, the charred, split or mangled trees, the water-filled craters and the deep, empty trenches.¹

During this visit, Everard and her family stayed in the nearby village of Longueval, which had also been badly damaged after weeks of artillery fire. The present lot is one of two the artist painted of the village at this time, focusing on the line of telegraph poles and the wind pump. The other, titled Longueval, is in the Iziko South African National Gallery collection in Cape Town.

1. Frieda Harmsen (1980) The Women of Bonnefoi: The Story of the Everard Group, Pretoria: JL van Schaik, pages 122 to 125.

Literature

Louisa Eriksen-Miller (2002) Landscape as Metaphor: The Interpretation of Selected Paintings by (Amy) Bertha Everard, unpublished MA dissertation, University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, illustrated as fig. 95, titled Road to Longueval.