Notes

This idyllic rural image of water-carriers must have been painted in the mid-1940s as it was acquired in 1948 by the previous owner’s parents from Maggie Laubser’s solo exhibition at the Oranje Koffiehuis in Bloemfontein.

Towards the mid-1930s Laubser left the Cape on a protracted working holiday of nine months, staying with a family on a farm in Standerton, as Johan van Rooyen reports in his monograph. During this visit she also worked at Nelspruit and Irene, amongst others. Here she executed numerous studies of wood and water-carriers and it’s possible that this painting was inspired in part by those experiences.

The painting displays ample evidence of what Van Rooyen calls her “quality of sincerity’ⁱ and quotes the artist:
I still delight in it when people find pleasure in my work. To paint is to reach out, hoping that one will touch. One wants to be understood.^ii
i Johan van Rooyen, Maggie Laubser, C. Struik Publishers, Cape Town and Johannesburg, 1974, page 22.
ⁱⁱ Laubser in an interview with Johan van Rooyen, SAAA Art News, November 1968.

Provenance

Prof and Mrs J S Booysens, Stellenbosch, acquired from an exhibition in Bloemfontein c.1948, S13460.
Strauss & Co, Johannesburg, 16 May 2011, lot 237.
Private Collection.

Exhibited

Oranje Koffiehuis Bloemfontein, 1948, catalogue number 15.

Literature

Dalene Marais (1994) Maggie Laubser: Her Paintings, Drawings and Graphics. Johannesburg and Cape Town: Perskor. Illustrated on page 286, catalogue number 1142.