Notes

The extensive repertoire of visual imagery on which JH Pierneef based his iconic and most famous body of work, the Johannesburg Station panels, a commission he received in 1929, includes this charming landscape painted in 1928 of the wine farms surrounding Stellenbosch. In fact, one of the peaks of the well-known Twee Jongen Gezellen can clearly be identified in the background. Pierneef traversed South Africa in search of interesting visual material and the panels depicted scenes from the Western Cape, from historic towns to famous holiday resorts of the then Transvaal, the mines on the Witwatersrand, from Natal to Namibia, and from the Southern Cape coastline to the Karoo.

Most of the characteristic features of Pierneef's painterly style can be identified in this work. Pierneef was fond of including some form of "obstacle" in the immediate foreground of his landscapes - in this case, the diagonal of the rolling slope on the left - challenging the viewer to overcome this visual barrier in order to access the scene beyond. The viewer, however, is immediately confronted by another obstacle - a much steeper hill on the right hand side, beyond which lie the homestead and the clump of trees, with the mountains dominating behind. The composition is further enhanced by the subtle direction of the artist's brush strokes that crisscross the picture plane: bright green diagonal strokes in the foreground, vertical ones forming the mountains, and a more gradual incline of the diagonal strokes which form the sky and clouds.

Provenance

Charl (Charlie) Malan, Minister of Railways 1924 -1933, who commissioned the Station Panels, and thence by descent