As a young boy, Matthys Swanepoel was fascinated by the changing light, colours and patterns cast by the early morning light through the curtains of his bedroom window. This sensibility would, many years later in 1971, culminate in the young history and Afrikaans teacher in George purchasing his first painting, a Frans Claerhout from the recently opened and much respected Matthys Strydom gallery.

This started a 55-year passion for art culminating in a worthy collection of works by artists such as Gerard Sekoto, Gregoire Boonzaier, Christo Coetzee, Peter Clarke, Paul du Toit, Eleanor Esmond White, Dirk Meerkotter, Cecil Skotnes, Jean Welz and Piet van Heerden, to name a few.

In 1991, he accepted a post at Wellington Teachers College, but as a married man with three children on a teacher’s salary, acquiring art was no easy feat; this did not deter Matthys.  He set his mind on buying one work a year, generally taking a full year to pay it off before setting his sights on the next artwork. Most of the works were purchased from Matthys Strydom’s gallery until 1988, when he also began to purchase art from the renowned Louis Schachat’s Kunskamer gallery and Riva Cohen’s Atlantic gallery in Cape Town.

Matthys' innate ability to recognise good quality art led him to become good friends with artists and to support them not only by purchasing their art but also by inviting the Wellington art community to exhibitions he curated in his Wellington home. In 1991, waiting in his car in Paarl, he was approached by a young man who showed him a drawing, and Matthys immediately recognised it as a remarkable work. The artist was Solomon Siko, who had studied for three years at The Community Arts Project (CAP) in Woodstock, and Matthys went on to hold two sell-out exhibitions for him, one in 1993 and another in 1994. Through Siko, he was introduced to Selwyn Pekeur, with whom he often visited Peter Clarke, and this accounts for his lovely collection of these artists’ works.