Artists

Born in Amsterdam in 1912, Gerard de Leeuw decided early on that he wanted to be a sculptor and studied at various schools in Holland, including the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp under Isidore Opsomer, and in France, including in the studio of André Lhôte in Paris. He followed his family to South Africa in 1932, after his goldsmith father migrated to Cape Town in 1928 for health reasons. De Leeuw was inspired by the work of animalier Francois Pompon, which was to have a lasting influence on his own animal studies, and late-Renaissance sculptor Benvenuto Cellini. He mastered the intricacies of the lost-wax method of bronze casting, or cire perdue, and, with the exception of the larger sculptures, insisted on casting all his own work in his suburban foundry in Orange Grove, Johannesburg, with some help from his assistant Simon Rammutla and his sons John and Gerard junior (whose portrait bust as a young boy he made in 1960). Always the perfectionist, De Leeuw would destroy works that he found to be unsatisfactory.