Notes

Born in the Hague in 1873, Pieter Wenning moved to South Africa in 1905, settling in Sunnyside, Pretoria. As Esmé Berman recalls “Wenning only began to find himself as a landscape painter during his first visit to the Cape. He had not responded creatively to the clear, dry atmosphere, the spacious depth and warm colouration of the Transvaal scene. However in the mediterranean climate of the Cape Peninsula he encountered sombre skies and abbreviated vistas reminiscent of his homeland”. ¹

It was his visit to the Cape in 1916 that allowed Wenning to give himself over fully to painting.  In the remaining five years of his life, considered to be his high period, Wenning developed a “spontaneous lyricism of composition and a greater purity of colour”.

The present lot, executed on an overcast, dimly lit day in August 1918, illustrates Wenning at the pinnacle of his perceptive mastery. Referring to the work, D.C. Boonzaier, who had befriended Wenning on one of his first visits to the Cape in 1912, remarked “that his colour scheme has never been more beautiful, harmonious and refined”.²

Wenning was known for his long painting excursions that saw him venture great distances through the southern suburbs in Newlands and Bishopcourt, despite the often-grim weather from where he drew his inspiration. A scholar of Dutch Impressionism, Wenning’s later work of which this lot is an example, displays a distinctively oriental influence of the “Japanese style”, where he eliminates “inessential data” with his line “acquiring an expressive calligraphic personality”.³ Berman further points to a distinct affinity with the Post-Impressionist ideals of Paul Cézanne.  

The scene painted here is of the rear of the old school behind the bishop’s house and features three leafless oaks against a subtle purple sky contrasted against the ochres of the buildings and the flash of green in the foreground.

Heather Martienssen suggests that with his “eye ruthlessly selective of what was at once simply there before him” Wenning “developed a manner of painting that illuminated the familiar”. For her, his influence was so great that it “promoted the whole genre of the Cape landscape school” and for a generation, “the painters of the Cape were caught in a visual vocabulary that emanated from his example and placed him for all time at the beginning of South African painting”.⁴

1. Esmé Berman (1983). Art and Artists of South Africa, Cape Town: Southern Book Publishers. Page 495.
2. J du P Scholtz (1973). DC Boonzaier en Pieter Wenning, Verslag van 'n Vriendskap, Cape Town and Johannesburg: Tafelberg. Page 60.
3. Esmé Berman (1983). Ibid
4. Harco Wenning (1976). My Father, Cape Town: Howard Timmins. Page 11.

 

Provenance

Prof JJ Smith, Stellenbosch.
Dr Anna H Smith.
Stephan Welz & Co in association with Sotheby's, Mostertsdrift, Stellenbosch, 19 & 20 August 1996, lot 192.

The Labia Collection.

Exhibited

South African Association of Arts, London, Exhibition of SA Art Abroad, 1948-49, catalogue number 124.

Literature

Gregoire Boonzaier and Lippy Lipshitz (1949). Wenning, Cape Town: Unie-Volkspers Beperk. Illustration plate 72, with the title 'The Yellow House'.

AC Bouman (1955). Painters of South Africa, Cape Town: HAUM h/a JH De Bussy. Page 10 and illustrated on page 6, with the title 'Bishop's Court'.

J du P Scholtz (1973). DC Boonzaier en Pieter Wenning, Verslag van 'n Vriendskap, Cape Town and Johannesburg: Tafelberg. Page 60, illustrated on page 124, plate 94.

Esmé Berman (1975). The Story of South African Painting, Cape Town: Balkema. Page 26, illustrated in colour, plate 6, with the title 'Bishop's Court, Cape Town'.

Esmé Berman (1983). Art and Artists of South Africa, Cape Town: Southern Book Publishers. Illustrated in colour, plate 494/495, with the title 'Bishops Court, CT'.