Notes

Naudé was the first South African to train seriously abroad, working at the Slade in London, the Kunst Akademie in Munich, and then for a year in 1895 with the Barbizon painters in Fontainebleau near Paris. It was perhaps the latter experience most of all that helped him develop his distinctive, homespun Cape Impressionist style on his return. Like the Barbizon painters before him, he set out to capture honest vignettes in the landscape, but did so using the spirited, brilliant, buttery strokes of colour that better reflected the African light around him.

The artist is perhaps best known for his spectacular springtime vistas of Namaqualand in bloom, his purple, moody mountains, and his intimate backyard scenes in Worcester, but during his wide travels across the country he painted a number of remarkable views of iconic landmarks. The present lot, a breath-taking, far-reaching view over the Matopos in Rhodesia, is one such example. It was most likely painted on his first trip to the Victoria Falls in 1897. Naudé, like Cecil Rhodes, who chose the Matopos as his resting place, was hugely moved by the area's solitude and its endless horizons, not to mention the now familiar shapes of the prehistoric, weathered, balancing granite boulders and dramatic kopjes. View Over the Matopos, while foreshadowing his smaller-scale, more fleetingly painted pictures, is a particularly large, carefully observed, and fully realised work. Evidence of the great care the artist took to settle on his design can be found in one of his earliest sketchbooks, now in private hands, in which he drew numerous studies of the scene (fig.1). With this sketch at hand, one is also reminded of Naudé's contribution to the great tradition of topographical pictures in the country (see also Frans Oerder's East African Coast, Lot 206). With its intuitive combination of creamed purples and gently-dulled yellows, View Over the Matopos is an earnest, beautiful record of a lost view.