Cape Town Docks

Provenance

Fabian Fine Art, Cape Town.

Private Collection.

Exhibited

Grosvenor Gallery, London, Irma Stern Memorial Exhibition, 14 March to 15 April 1967, cat. no. 61.

Literature

Neville Dubow (1974) Irma Stern, Cape Town: C Struik Publishers, illustrated in colour on the cover.

Marion Arnold (1995) Irma Stern: A Feast for the Eye, Cape Town: Fernwood Press, illustrated in colour on page 87.

Notes

Although best known for her portraits and still lifes, Irma Stern was a prolific painter who also consistently worked in the genres of landscape and the nude. Her marine paintings, in which themes of landscape and labour frequently converge, form a substantial yet comparatively overlooked aspect of her output. Throughout her career she repeatedly returned to harbours, beaches and coastal settlements, depicting both the rhythms of maritime work and the changing character of life along Atlantic and Mediterranean shorelines.

Biography offers one explanation for this enduring interest. From childhood, Stern crossed regularly between South Africa and Europe by sea, and harbours became recurring points of arrival and departure in her life. One of the final images reproduced in her private journal, covering the years 1919 to 1924 and published posthumously in 1991, depicts Cape Town seen from Table Bay in gradations of black, accompanied by the evocative German caption: “And the sea roared through my dreams.”¹(fig 1)

Stern’s early sketchbooks include numerous depictions of harbours, but a transformative three-month stay in Madeira in 1931 saw the subject assume a central place in her oil painting. The visit yielded a number of assured harbour scenes, notably an exceptional colourist work depicting three anonymous figures flanked by vividly decorated wooden fishing boats (fig 2). Acquired by the collectors Anton and Huberte Rupert, it was later lent to the 1967 memorial exhibition of Stern’s work in London, where the present lot was also exhibited.²

Following her first visit to Zanzibar in 1939, Stern produced a steady stream of gouaches and oils depicting harbours at Alicante, Istanbul and Venice, as well as scenes descriptive of Cape Town and nearby fishing communities such as Kalk Bay (fig 3). Painted in 1957, Cape Town Docks belongs to the final phase of Stern’s career, when her handling of oil paint became increasingly fluid and calligraphic. Two figures walk along the quayside beside a line of boldly painted fishing boats; their presence integrated into a composition that privileges painterly license and atmosphere over topographical precision.

Like many of Stern’s harbour scenes after her stay in Madeira, this work functions both as a record of place and as an understated meditation on maritime labour. Neville Dubow, writing in 1959 about Stern’s lifelong engagement with working-class communities whose lives were shaped by the soil and the sea, remarked: “Stern is at her best when the theme of her subjects is basic and powerful enough to match her own temperament – themes of harvest of the earth and the sea; themes where the abundance of nature can be measured by that of the artist.”³

^1. Neville Dubow (1991) Paradise: The Journal and Letters (1917–1993) of Irma Stern, Cape Town: Chameleon Press, pages 65 and 72.

^2. Grosvenor Gallery, London, Irma Stern Memorial Exhibition, exhibition catalogue, 14 March to 15 April 1967, page 7.

^3. Neville Dubow (1959) 'Irma Stern Shows Her Abundant Art', Cape Argus, 20 February.

Based on historical research and physical evidence, the present lot is believed to very likely depict the historic Alfred Basin at Table Bay Harbour, presently known as the V & A Waterfront. The composition captures the traditional quayside posts, commercial fishing boats, and the characteristic background silhouette of Signal Hill, aligning closely with the maritime architecture of Cape Town’s port. 

Images: National Library of South Africa, Cape Town. 

'And the sea roared through my dreams'

Neville Dubow (1991) Paradise: The Journal and Letters (1917–1993) of Irma Stern, Cape Town: Chameleon Press, pages 51-52.  

(fig 2) Fishing Boats, Madeira (1931) oil on canvas, image courtesy of the Rupert Art Foundation Collection, Rupert Museum, Stellenbosch. 

(fig 3) Fishing Boats, Kalk Bay (1931) and Harbour Scene, Kalk Bay (1956) illustrated in Marion Arnold (1995) Irma Stern: A Feast for the Eye, Cape Town: Fernwood Press, page 57.