Provenance

Acquired from the artist by the current owner in 1988.

Literature

Andrew Lamprecht (ed) (2011) Tretchikoff: The People’s Painter, Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, a similar example illustrated in colour on page 169 with the title The Charcoal Forest.

Notes

A late-career work, the present lot is one of a rare group of landscapes within Tretchikoff’s oeuvre. While best known for portraits and still lifes, he occasionally turned to elemental themes that explored the forces of nature itself. In the present lot, fire becomes both subject and metaphor: a searing vision of destruction and renewal, painted with dramatic contrasts of light and shadow.

The painting belongs to a continuum stretching back to his earliest years in South Africa, when he grappled with themes of fire, struggle, and survival. A comparable work, Forest Fire (1949), (sold by Strauss & Co, Johannesburg, 20 May 2019, lot 79), was included in Tretchikoff’s very first exhibition. In revisiting such imagery more than two decades later, the present lot reveals the persistence of his fascination with elemental drama and the destructive power of nature, which he understood as both terrifying and regenerative.

The composition is dominated by brilliant passages of flame, bursting skyward against a blackened ground. Here Tretchikoff uses paint with a boldness that heightens the drama, evoking the winds of the Cape fanning the blaze. Other works in this vein – depicting horses fleeing from a storm or springbok leaping through walls of fire – underscore his capacity to turn natural catastrophe into painterly spectacle. The present lot however, is more than spectacle: it stands as a meditation on resilience, the human capacity to endure and rebuild, and the cyclical nature of destruction and renewal.

Infrequently included in his exhibitions, these landscapes occupied a marginal place in Tretchikoff's career, overshadowed by his more iconic portraits. Yet their rarity, coupled with their raw intensity, gives them a distinctive importance. This lot testifies to Tretchikoff’s lifelong willingness to experiment beyond popular expectation, and to confront the elemental forces of his adopted land with a painter’s eye attuned to both beauty and danger.

Andrew Lamprecht, Curator of Historical Paintings and Sculpture at the Iziko South African National Gallery.