Notes

McGregor, a charming village at the foot of the Riviersonderend mountains, lies roughly 150km east of Cape Town. In 1905, a main road to Cape Town passing through the village was proposed, but was never constructed. As a result Mcgregor retained its allure as a peaceful retreat for artists and other creatives. This isolated, quiet town was the perfect repose for Pierneef when he visited the Cape after receiving the commission to paint the eponymous Johannesburg Station panels. He toured the Cape in 1929, and again for a protracted period from February to October in 1931, making numerous sketches and watercolours mainly of Table Mountain and Lion's Head, before moving on to Stellenbosch, where he was naturally attracted to the twin peaks of the mountains towering over the town. Before reaching the coastal town of Hermanus, he stopped over in the McGregor district where he recorded his impressions.

The present lot, evoking the feel of the Cape, may well have been considered as the basis for one of the Station Panels. What is of particular interest about this landscape, is the classic composition that is so characteristic of many of Pierneef's works. A curved dirt road leads to a homestead in the foreground, giving way to a mysterious drop beyond a row of sentinel trees, with some indication of extensive cultivated fields in the middle ground, ultimately culminating in a series of serrated mountain ranges. The work includes Pierneef's whole colour palette, and constitutes, as Esmé Berman describes "In a wealth of idealised landscape-compositions the cool harmonies of his earlier impressionistic paintings are reconciled with the intervening blaze of oranges and golds, to establish the unmistakable warm-cool palette of his middle years."¹

1. Esmé Berman. (1983) Art and Artists of South Africa. Cape Town: A A Balkema, page 330

Provenance

Sotheby Parke Bernet South Africa, Johannesburg, 18 September 1979, lot 81, The Property of Mrs WJ Steyn