Notes

At the end of 1956, having resigned from his position as a labourer in the Simon’s Town dockyard, frustrated and hesitant, but on the verge of a fulltime painting career, Peter Clarke travelled to Tesselaarsdal, near Caledon. The small rural town, with its neat fields and earnest workers, proved an inspiration: compared to his dockyard shifts the agricultural rhythms of life there were intriguing, while the dedication and sense of purpose showed by the shepherds and farmers he met seemed at odds with the increasing urban melancholy with which he was more familiar. Between 1956 and 1960 he returned every year during the spring, staying as long as he could, but always returning to Simon’s Town in time for Christmas. Forever observing his surroundings, and never without his pencils and watercolours, Clarke quickly filled his sketchbooks with commonplace vignettes: rooster heads poking out of a haversack, men resting on their hoes, a crooked gutter, or a friend sleeping in the sun. Yet it was in the everyday that he found his most moving motifs. The current lot, The Red Road, is a case in point, with the shuffling pair and the winding road taking on symbolic significance: the image of lonely figures, backs turned, would later become a trope for displacement, while the road into Tesselaarsdal represented the new and exciting opportunities the artist had found outside of Simon’s Town. While politics and social commentary is ingrained in Clarke’s work, the current lot, an eye-catching and fully resolved gouache, is also a simple snapshot of a tender, comforting and cross-generational moment, caught under a sensational, flashing-blue sky.

Provenance

Strauss & Co, Johannesburg, 11 November 2019, lot 14.