oil on board

Artwork date: 1920
Signature details: signed and dated bottom left

(1)

70 x 98 cm

Notes:

JH Pierneef holds a unique place in South African art history and in our imagination. While he had many admirers, there were few—if any—who shared his unique vision, making his paintings as highly sought after today as they were in his day. In this rare early painting, the artist captures the particularities of a specific South African landscape with apparently effortless ease, revealing both the spirit of the place and the quality of outdoor life he so loved and enjoyed. While trees are a favourite subject for Pierneef, baobabs are rare. This centuryold work is probably his earliest painting of these extraordinary trees found in lowlying areas of Africa and Australia. Growing to enormous sizes, they may live to be 3,000 years old, according to carbon dating.1 The site featured in the painting, the Soutpansberg area, includes Mapungubwe National Park and World Heritage Site as well as the Kruger National Park. According to renowned botanist and horticulturalist Dr Ernst van Jaarsveld, formerly of Kirstenbosch National Botanical Gardens and now at the helm of Babylonstoren, the vegetation of this area is known as Musina Mopane Bushveld which is part of the Savanna Biome. Important trees in the area include mopane (Colophospermum mopane), knob-thorn (Acacia nigrescens), redbush willow (Combretum apiculatum), Sheppard tree (Boscia albitrunca), and various corkwood (Commiphora spp.).2 However, it is the baobab which is very common to this area—in fact, more common than anywhere else in southern Africa—that is one of the most spectacular sights to behold. With his generosity of spirit, Pierneef was always ready to share his experience and enthusiasm for the local landscape, and as an admirer of its exquisite beauty he depicted its vistas and moods with such authenticity that he enables us to see it afresh, as Anton Hendricks, Director of the Johannesburg Art Gallery from 1937 to 1964, has observed.3 While benefitting from the professional instruction in drawing he received at the Rotterdam Academy in 1901, Pierneef must have been impressed by the city’s extraordinary Jugendstil architecture to be seen in the Scheepvaartkwartier (shipping quarter)—a significant influence, perhaps, on the sinuous lines and bright, jewel-like colour of this early painting. The rapid application of visible brushstrokes indicates some exposure to the Hague School artists who, from the mid-nineteenth century, adapted the techniques of French Impressionism to their weather conditions in The Netherlands. Pierneef, in turn, brightened his palette to capture the intense sunlight of the local landscape. In 1912 and 1913 a number of Pierneef’s oil paintings were included in an exhibition of Pretoria artists known as The Individualists. A solo show at De Bussy’s in Pretoria in October 1913 was followed by exhibitions in Bloemfontein (1919) and in Stellenbosch (April 1921), where the present lot was, in all likelihood, purchased by Hendrik verLoren van Themaat who had been invited to take up his post in the Law Faculty of the University of Stellenbosch from 1920, after having obtained his Doctorate in Law at Leiden University in The Netherlands.

Emma Bedford

Sources:

1 http://www.krugerpark.co.za/africa_baobab.html 2 Email to the author, dated 28 November 2019. 3 Hendricks, A. (undated) ‘Jacob Hendrik Pierneef’ in Ons Kuns 1. Pretoria: S. A. Association for the Advancement of Knowledge and Culture. Translated from the Afrikaans by the author.