Notes

Few, if any, South African sculptures are as eloquent, absorbing and moving as Anton van Wouw's Boer War-era masterpiece, Slegte Nuus (Bad News). Modelled in 1907, during a hot streak of creativity, the work catches two crestfallen Boer soldiers, broken in body and spirit, but brave and ever-hardy, resigned to the loss of their Republics' independence or their own impending imprisonment. The moment is heartbreaking and inspirational: one man rests his head on the other, his right ankle snapped and useless, his physical pain buried, and his bandolier all but empty; the other's stare is dogged and fixed forward, his soft veld hat throwing shadows across his gaunt face, his rifle temporarily downed, and his expression haunted by suffering. The work is a poignant tribute to brotherhood, and an enduring image of courage, grit and patriotism. As it was conceived as a domestic-scale mini-monument, the first castings of Slegte Nuus, all coming out of Giovanni Nisini's Roman foundry, were sizeable and hefty, measuring 60cm in length and standing 33cm high. The sheer weight of bronze required for each casting, not to mention the shipping realities between Italy and South Africa in the early twentieth-century, made the work particularly expensive. With this in mind, presumably, Van Wouw's Transvaal-based investors, who funded his career from 1906, commissioned a smaller and more affordable version of the work. The artist modelled the scaled-down plaster in 1911, and the moulds were made by the Nisini foundrymen shortly thereafter. Remarkably, recently discovered Nisini order sheets show that only two bronze castings of the miniature version of Slegte Nuus were ever made, neither of them selling before 1925 at the earliest. The present lot - neat, sharply finished and elegantly timeworn - is therefore one of only two in existence, and has recently been repatriated from a collection in Austria.

Thanks to Gerard de Kamper for his assistance in cataloguing this lot.