Notes

Jacob Hendrik Pierneef’s A Mountain Gorge with a River Running Through It is a key work in the artist’s oeuvre for several reasons. It clearly reveals his early exposure to European art training and artistic developments and how he began to forge these into a unique South African style that was to capture the imagination of art lovers.

While in the Netherlands with his family from 1901 until 1903, Pierneef attended the Rotterdam art school, Academia Erasmiana, admired the Old Masters at the Boymans van Beuningen Museum and visited art exhibitions at local galleries.

During a second visit to Europe in 1925 and 1926 Pierneef’s exhibition of paintings, drawings and graphic work on the Herengracht in Amsterdam made a great impression according to Anton Hendriks (artist and Director of the Johannesburg Art Gallery from 1937 until mid-60s), who maintained: “The work expresses an optimism and a certainty that has been missing in art in Europe for the last twenty years”.ⁱ

He arranged a meeting between Pierneef and Willem van Konijnenburg, the Dutch artist and art theorist whose ideas on the role of geometry in creating a parallel between earthly and spiritual worlds were to have such a profound impact on Pierneef.

Painted in 1928, after that significant meeting, Pierneef used lively brushwork with varied strokes to capture the effect of dappled sunlight on surfaces as he had observed in the works of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. Yet the solidity of the gorges derives from his new interest in structure and draughtsmanship gained from his discussions with Van Konijnenburg. It's noteworthy how this painting forms a bridge in Pierneef’s development from his earlier painterly work into his later emblematic style.

His deft compositional use of the meandering river to lead the eye between the cliffs and into the distance where the horizon is crowned by a brilliantly lit cumulus cloud that commands attention, leaves no doubt about Pierneef’s mastery of space and light.

ⁱ P G Nel, J H Pierneef: His Life and his Work, Perskor, Cape Town and Johannesburg, 1990, page 135.