South African Art, Jewellery and Decorative Arts

Live Auction, 8 October 2012

Session 3

Sold for

ZAR 501 300
Lot 446
  • Maggie Laubser; Landscape with Huts and Water Carrier


Lot Estimate
ZAR 500 000 - 700 000
Selling Price
Incl. Buyer's Premium & VAT
ZAR 501 300

About this Item

South African 1886-1973
Landscape with Huts and Water Carrier

signed

oil on canvas board
39,5 by 50cm excluding frame

Notes

We know from Dalene Marais’s catalogue raisonné that this painting was acquired in Johannesburg in the forties so we may assume it was painted in the thirties or even the early forties. It was painted at a time when Laubser was using stronger colour contrasts in larger more clearly defined areas to express her understanding of structure and clarity.

Colours are so crisp that one easily imagines a fresh morning. The lime green grass in the foreground and the puffy clouds in Cerulean blue skies above create a vivid atmosphere alive with a sense of profound joy and great optimism in country life. As Johannes Meintjes pointed out in 1947, Laubser did not paint to represent subjects but to express her own feelings.1

Laubser herself declared: “We are living in a wonderful world. My philosophy is that everything is beautiful”.2 According to Elizabeth Delmont, this positive attitude found expression through a style of painting in which bright colours reflected her optimism.3

Cottages nestle on the hillside and a sheep nibbles the grass in the foreground. A younger woman strides home with her baby on her back and a water vessel on her head while an older woman snoozes against the wall of her home. All is contentment and nothing disturbs the promise of a perfect day.
1. Dalene Marais, Maggie Laubser: her paintings, drawings and graphics, Perskor, Johannesburg and Cape Town, 1994, page 52.
2. ‘Everything is Beautiful’, Star, City Late ed, 26 April 1962, page 12, column 3.
3. E Bedford and L McClelland, Maggie Laubser – Early Works from the Silberberg Collection, South African National Gallery, 1987, page 6.
 

Literature

Dalene Marais, Maggie Laubser: her paintings,drawings and graphics, Perskor Publishers, Johannesburg and Cape Town, 1994,  page 284, catalogue number 1130, illustrated

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