Notes

Mr Himan Bernadt, a prominent attorney who protected Nelson Mandela from the vicious prison regime on Robben Island, supported young and upcoming artists at the time, including Peter Clarke. Mr Abram Kesler, the current owner's uncle, and Mr Bernadt were great friends.

The current lot was painted on 24.7.1964, the day after Harvesters, Teslaarsdal, lot 621, which sold at Strauss & Co, on 10 October 2020, for R 569 000.

In 1964, Peter Clarke's work was represented at the Venice Biennale. It was also the year he returned to painting in oil, revisiting rural subjects from Tesselaarsdal. These were painted retrospectively from drawings and watercolours he had made there before going to Amsterdam. "Despite the stressful political developments of later 1964, the rural world beyond the mountains seems to have been a place whose mood Clarke could reach imaginatively and relive at will - a creative refuge for a 'coloured' artist living under apartheid."¹

Evident in Landskap met Kleinhuisie, Teslaarsdal, "the figures that appear in Clarke's landscapes of 1964 are workers seemingly in harmony with the land, often shown in profile or rearview, a non-intrusive mode often adopted by Clarke."²

^1. Philippa Hobbs and Elizabeth Rankin (2011) Listening to Distant Thunder: The Art of Peter Clarke, Johannesburg: Standard Bank of South Africa, page 105.
^2. Ibid, page 106.

Provenance

Mr and Mrs Himan (Himie) Bernadt, Cape Town.

Mr Abram Kesler, Cape Town, the current owner's uncle, thence by descent.