Notes

Irma Stern produced a number of compelling flower paintings using gouache in the 1930s. These works are distinguished by the softness of their palette and overall restrained mood. Stern was a dab hand with gouache, an opaque watercolour medium, having used it to create the lyrical images appearing in her autobiographical Paradise journal (1919–24). Her earliest South African exhibition from 1922 included 33 examples of her watercolours. Later in the same decade Stern started to use gouache more consistently, alongside charcoal, to describe the people and landscapes she encountered while travelling across Southern Africa.

Gouache, while essentially a notational medium for Stern, requires great aptitude for colour. This lot showcases Stern’s remarkable handling of colour, both as material to create an image and means to dialogue with art history. The subject of this still life is one of the many fruit-bearing Rosaceae trees common across the Western Cape. The cut stems with vivid white blooms are shown held in a mustard pot that has been set on a circular wicker tray. Stern’s assured detailing on the pot with precise vertical bands of colour and criss-cross markings for the tray contrasts with the energetic whorls of pink and dirty clouds of white that encompass the flower arrangement.

While compositionally related to the austere still lifes of Camille Pissarro from the 1870s and suite of blossoming almond branches by Van Gogh from the subsequent decade, the restrained detailing of the flower-bearing stems also invokes the classical Chinese tradition of painting plum blossoms. A winterblooming flower, the plum blossom is regarded as a signifier of resilience in China. Stern, an avid museumgoer during her European travels, voracious reader and collector of classical Chinese artefacts, would have been aware of all these sublimated references.