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Draw breath for the one shilling Dagga Smoker set for a high of almost half a million Rand at Strauss & Co auction

In a long career spanning 85 years, Peter Clarke produced remarkably few portraits of children making this Portrait of a Young Boy a rare find.

Strauss & Co’s Spring auction on 12 October at the Vineyard Hotel in Newlands promises a veritable cornucopia of rare and beautiful South African and international art from Irma Stern, JH Pierneef, Pieter Wenning, Jean Welz, Walter Battiss and Erik Laubscher to Robert Hodgins, William Kentridge and Penny Siopis. Younger artists include Georgina Gratrix, Athi-Patra Ruga, 2015 winner of the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Performance Art, and Mohau Modisakeng. An early hand-coloured print by Colin Richards is likely to appeal to discerning collectors. International works range from seventeenth-century portrait paintings to works by Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse and Diego Rivera.

By Sean O’Toole. Rejection can be motivating force in an artist’s life. Take the definitive “no” that prefaced the start of much-loved painter Erik Laubscher’s prodigious career. In 1946, Tulbagh-born Laubscher, whose work is now highly sought after, knocked on a door at the Michaelis School of Fine Art and enquired from a secretary about his application to study at this prestigious Cape Town art school.