Approaching Storm, Sabi Sands

NOTES

Already a cultural icon by the late 1940s, and in much demand, Henk Pierneef was distracted by lecturing obligations, studio visits, municipal commissions, and exhibition openings in his final decade. During these twilight years, and wishing for peaceful opportunities to paint, he made a number of trips to the Lowveld, one of his spiritual landscapes. In 1952, he visited friends on their game farm in the then recently incorporated Sabi Sands Private Reserve. From the stoeps of one of the scattered rondavels, or the old farmhouse on the banks of the Manyeleti River, the artist was faced with beautiful bushveld views in all directions. According to family lore, Pierneef was moved during this stay by the spectacle of an approaching storm over the plains, and painted the scene as a parting gift. This remarkable work, the present lot, has remained a treasured family heirloom ever since. As a late-career masterpiece, it brings to mind record-breaking paintings such as Bushveld, Pafuri (1952) and Bosveld (1953), that passed through these salerooms in 2020 and 2021 respectively.

Pierneef’s best late paintings, most of them from the early 1950s, are defined by their large scale, confident simplification, decorative power, hushed tone, and solemn colour combinations. More often than not, they are also defined by magnificent, soaring, indigenous trees. In Approaching Storm, Sabi Sands, Pierneef arranges a number of giant trees across the midground, their metallic-grey trunks shimmering in the changing light. Handsome, enduring, and imposing, these trees dominate the composition, their outer branches, shaded or not, linking one to the next, creating the decorative framework that locks together the beautiful bushveld view. The recession of the landscape is convincing and carefully planned: the dusty foreground, red, dry and scratched bare by hooves, gives way to neat rows of swaying grasses, each throwing olive and grey shadows on the one behind, until a dense thicket appears in the distance. The painting of this final treeline is breathtaking: against a heavy band of gloomy lavender, smaller trees with electric-lime leaves, light up the low horizon.

The drama across this pristine Lowveld landscape is matched by the theatre above in the skies. The moment of an approaching storm is caught quite beautifully in the changing cloudscape. Masses of white, sheets of silver, and ribbons of mauve compete and interlock, while a darker raincloud forms in the highest register of the composition. A break in the clouds, however, in the top right corner of the painting, allows a glowing light to touch the layered tree canopies.

There is something particularly poignant about Pierneef’s late pictures. As his output slowed slightly, one can imagine his joy putting the finishing touches to a large-format and successful canvas such as this one. Approaching Storm, Sabi Sands has hung in a single-family collection for decades, magnificent proof of the artist’s lifelong obsession with the South African bushveld.

SUPPLEMENTARY IMAGES

JH Pierneef, Bosveld, 1953. Sold for R10 242 000

JH Pierneef, Bushveld, Pafuri, 1952. Sold for R11 607 600