Notes

Pierneef’s painting, Trees by a Dam, provides a view of the Hartbeespoort Dam. Painted in 1928, shortly after the reservoir wall was constructed and the first waters flowed in 1925, the painting celebrated a favourite landscape while evoking pride in South African engineering and ingenuity.

Promoted as a place of beauty and pleasure, the dam is surrounded by the majestic Magaliesberg mountain range, which the artist has captured here with spectacular effect. The attraction of Hartbeespoort as a very popular holiday and weekend resort and as the principal water recreation area of northern Gauteng makes this a desirable subject. Similar themes were favoured by the Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists with whose work Pierneef would have become acquainted while he was in Europe from 1924 to 1926.

Compare, for example, Claude Monet’s Bathing at La Grenouillère (1869), his interpretation of a popular, mid-nineteenth century riverside bathing and boating resort facing the left bank of the Seine. Both Pierneef and Monet capture the shimmering quality of light by eschewing outlines and tonal modelling in favour of broken brushstrokes that achieve lively surfaces.

Pierneef captures the brilliance of the bright, South African light in iridescent pinks, blues and yellows that are not modulated by black. But structure is not sacrificed to effect: the composition is constructed from intersecting diagonals with sloping brushstrokes lending additional dynamism. The foreground rocks and vegetation painted in saturated colours appear to advance towards the viewer, providing a frame through which to view the sparkling water and spectacular rock formations painted in glowing pastels that makes them recede. Rich colour, brilliant light and lively brushstrokes that capture and reflect light, make the painting appear as fresh as the day it was painted.

The Magaliesberg Mountains consist of quartzitic sandstone with the vegetation of the outcrops at Hartbeespoort Dam, classified as Gold Reef Mountain Bushveld, consisting of grassland with trees and shrubs and various smaller perennials, bulbous and succulent plants. The shrub in the foreground with its reddish bark is probably the bergmispel (Vangueria parvifolia). In the left hand corner the evergreen shrubbery could be red ivory (Berchemia zeyheri), witpendoring (Maytenus undata) or Koebo berry (Mystroxylon aethiopicum) which are commonly encountered the region. Trees and shrubs in the background may be mountain karree (Searsia leptodictya), Taaibos (Searsia pyroides), stemfruit (Englerophytum magalismontanum), buffalo thorn (Ziziphus mucronata) and the deurmekaarbos (Ehretia rigida). While a number of aloes have been recorded for the region, the plant on the right hand is probably A. cryptopoda.¹

Hartbeespoort Dam, also known as Harties, recently became the focus of eco-friendly programmes around water quality, launched by the South African Department of Water Affairs and Forestry, entitled Harties metsi a me or Harties, My Water.
1. Information provided by Ernst van Jaarsveld, Botanist and Horticulturist at Kirstenbosch National Botanical Gardens

Provenance

Mr H. M. Slade, Pierneef's legal adviser in Pretoria