Provenance

Dr V E Hesse.

Stephan Welz & Co in Association with Sotheby's, Johannesburg, 20 October 2003, lot 276.

Exhibited

Pretoria Art Museum, Pretoria, Pretoria, 1988, cat no. 26.

Pretoria Art Museum, Pretoria, Frans Oerder Retrospective, date unknown.

Notes

Frans Oerder, who received a typically rigorous nineteenth-century training at the Rotterdam Academy, arrived in Pretoria in 1890. With traditional commissions few and far between, he found work initially with the Zuid-Afrikaansche Spoorweg Maatschappij as a labourer-painter along the line to Delagoa Bay. Alongside his teaching position at the Staatsmeisjesskool in Pretoria, which he took up in 1894, he worked closely with his countryman, the master sculptor Anton van Wouw, often from the same studio. Oerder painted the landscapes on the outskirts of Pretoria with breathtaking skill, catching the harshly beautiful Highveld light as it fell across eroded dongas, waving grasslands, and stony ridges. While he painted a number of Boer portraits and interiors too, many of his early subjects were black sitters. Through the 1890s, then, in the lead up to the outbreak of war, he created a handsome and historically important record of the black farmhands, cardplayers, indunas, cattle drivers, drunkards, washerwomen and wandering teenagers that lived on the fringes of Pretorian society. The present lot, Leisure Hours, is a prime example from this body of work, showing four ragtag youths, relaxed amongst the smoke of a small fire, within a golden and wintry landscape. Three of the boys are seated, sun on their shoulders, while another stands thin and tall, bowler-hatted and confident, with a harmonica on his lips.