Notes

Attending an auction of Pieter Wenning’s works at Ernest Lezard in February 1919, Gordon Campbell Tomlinson, an attorney at Vredefort, author, and a major player in the second Afrikaans language movement, purchased two pictures, including the gorgeous Landscape, Pretoria. He paid £15, a record for Wenning at the time. While Wenning’s debt to the artists of The Hague School is clear in this work, his Pretorian palette, with lush summer greens, creamy whites in the clouds, and the bright denim blue of the Highveld sky, is more vivid and dazzling. A sense of confidence and freedom comes across in the brushstroke, while exciting flashes of intense olive and terracotta punctuate the scene.

Provenance

Gordon Campbell Tomlinson.
Strauss & Co, Johannesburg, 1 November 2010, lot 155.
Private Collection.