Notes

Highveld willow trees, whether skeletal and bare or sagging under the weight of their silver-green leaves, remained one of Henk Pierneef’s favourite motifs. The tree’s familiar silhouette dominated many of his early studies, while a number of examples were made during his final painting trips in 1956. From 1910 he sketched endlessly the enormous willow that shaded his garden on De Waal Street in Pretoria, and he produced numerous, seasonal linocuts of the tree’s shifting outlines. One such winter example – with stripped, outstretched branches decorating the linoleum plate with a delicate, notched latticework – went on show at the first exhibition of The Individualists in the Pretoria Town Hall in 1911, alongside entries from Pieter Wenning, Marcelle Piltan, Selina Harding, Nina Murray and Sydney Stent. “I have studied the tree to the point of exhaustion,” he noted at the time. “I know every bend in its trunk… I could draw by heart every gnarl in its bark… The willow is the most beautiful tree that I know…”¹

After kind reviews of his contributions to the second exhibition of The Individualists in 1912, Pierneef, who was still working late shifts at the State Library at the time, staged his first solo show in 1913. So tightly themed was his selection at the JH de Bussy Building that, despite the range of works in oils, pastels and black crayon, the reviewer for the Pretoria News could happily appreciate ‘the cult of the willow’, while another visitor left feeling that she ‘had been looking at works of genius’.² With such praise in mind, but without conclusive exhibition lists at hand, one can only assume that the present lot was included in this defining show. A sense of summer, evoked by heavy-hanging branches against a late afternoon sky, is particularly memorable, as are the marks of sunlit-gold glinting on the ground where the tree’s shadows end.

1 See PG Nel (ed.), JH Pierneef: His Life and His Works. Johannesburg: Peskor, 1990, page 43.

2 Ibid.

Provenance

Sotheby Parke Bernet South Africa (Pty) Ltd, Johannesburg, 22 October 1974, lot 331.