Provenance

A gift from the artist to Stefanus François Naudé Gie, then the South African Secretary of Education, and thence by descent.

Literature

PG Nel. (1990) JH Pierneef: His Life and His Work, Johannesburg: Perskor, the related lithograph illustrated in colour on page 120 and 121.

Notes

His colour harmonies are surprising in their variety. No artist in South Africa has ever worked out such delicate and attractive colour schemes.
- Walter Battiss

Painted in the late 1920s or early 1930s, certainly after the artist’s important study trip to Europe between 1925 and 1926, Plaas Hartbeesfontein is a shimmering joy. The view, conjured with gently glowing combinations of emerald green, indigo and amber, shows a neat farmstead with segmented fields bordered by rows of trees. The rolling hills, punctuated with low-spreading acacias, setup an evocative contrast between the sown and cultivated fields and the surrounding veld. Pierneef’s brushwork is particularly confident and liberated: short and lively for the swaying grassland and rustling treetops, long and sinuous for the sunlit hills and shadowy contours.

Lithographic reproductions of Plaas Hartbeesfontein appeared in the early 1930s. In 1933 some impressions were seemingly printed by Kühn, Rotterdam, to coincide with Pierneef’s exhibition at the Rotterdamse Volksuniversiteit. The Hartbeesfontein farm was nestled on the northern slopes of the Magaliesberg to the west of the Derdepoort farm.