Notes

Meintjieskop is a prominent landform in the artist’s home town of Pretoria and acquired significance once it was chosen as the site for the Union Buildings - the seat of government and the symbol of a unified country.  Numerous compositions in various media featuring Meintjieskop can be found throughout the artist’s career which strongly suggest this place to be one of personal significance to the artist. This work, dating from 1922, is an important piece in that it demonstrates Pierneef’s pioneering stylistic development away from his more detailed and embellished paintings from the early 1920s into the more simplified style for which he is well renowned.

This stylistic shift enabled the artist to work more rapidly and on a larger scale using a broader treatment of forms to create an elemental cohesion with increased pictorial drama. The powerful use of red in the foreground contrasts strongly against the dramatic towering storm clouds rising over Meintjieskop.  The crowning blue arc above the cloud structure references a neoclassical painting canon which is often paired with elements of the divine. Pierneef’s celebration of the natural world is always evident and, according to Juliette Leeb-du Toit: “Reverence for nature was paramount, such ideas closely echoing the pervasive influence at the time of theosophy (and later anthroposophy), in which a renewed reverence for nature was coupled with the desire to restore humankind’s sense of self.”¹ The artist’s most celebrated version of this subject forms part of the Station Panels, titled Apies River, Pretoria, where the artist has painted the same subject from a slightly different angle.

1 Juliette Leeb du Toit, Visual Century: South African Art in Context, Chapter Eight, Land and Landlessness: Wits University Press, page 185.

Literature

cf. JFW Grosskopf (1945) Hendrik Pierneef: Die Man en sy Werk Pretoria: Van Schaik. A similar example illustrated, plate 56.