Notes

This tightly cropped portrait depicts an AmaMpondo woman drawing smoke from a traditional long-stemmed pipe, a privilege of motherhood. The portrait was most likely produced after Stern’s travels to the Transkei, now Eastern Cape, in 1952. Formerly known as Pondoland, Stern made numerous research trips to this region from the 1920s onwards. In a 1953 interview she spoke of changes, both in herself and the peoples she had recently encountered. “The old ease of communication had gone,” remarked Stern.¹ Portraits of indigenes from this later period were well received when they were first exhibited. “They are a long way from her sometimes inchoate and tumultuous creations which bear so strongly the imprint of the Brücke period in German painting,” noted a Sunday Times critic of similar works.² This portrait was acquired in the late 1950s from the Gainsborough Galleries in Johannesburg. The purchaser, AEF Bosman, a minister of the Dutch Reformed Church in Heidelberg, was a neighbour of Matthys Strydom. The dominee agreed terms to pay it off piecemeal with Stern. The portrait was proudly displayed in the parsonage’s lounge, much to the consternation of some the churchman’s more conservative congregants. Strydom acquired the work years later from the dominee’s daughter. He too agreed instalment terms with the seller.

^1. Marion Arnold (1995) Irma Stern: A Feast for the Eye. Cape Town: Fernwood Press, page 75.
^2. BL (1952) “Irma Stern Explores New Fields”, Sunday Times, 23 January.

Provenance

Gainsborough Galleries, Johannesburg.

Dr AEF Bosman and thence by descent to his daughter Liza Bosman Greef, 1998.

Dr Matthys Johannes Strydom Family Collection.

Literature

Matthys Strydom (2016) Stories Teen My Muur, Eversdal: Inset Uitgewers, illustrated in colour on page 81.