Literature

Richard Buncher (1950) Tretchikoff, Cape Town: Howard Timmins, illustrated in black and white, unpaginated.

Andrew Lamprecht (ed) (2011) Tretchikoff: The People’s Painter, Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball Publisher, illustrated in colour on page 25, with the title The Flower Seller.

Notes

Vladimir Tretchikoff created numerous portraits of Cape Town’s iconic flower sellers, particularly in the year following his sensational debut
exhibition in 1948. This striking portrait of an anonymous woman in a green headscarf offering red-hot pokers (torch lilies) and pincushion
proteas exemplifies his confident sense of design and bold use of colour. Equally notable is his sculptural application of paint to render the flower heads. Tretchikoff’s inspiration for this and other works sharing the same title came from women active at Trafalgar Place and the Grand Parade in central Cape Town, as well as Sea Point where he rented an apartment in the 1940s.

The history of Cape Town’s flower trade is still being pieced together, but its origins trace back to the 1880s. One possibly exaggerated account credits two white businessmen with initiating the trade by placing a standing order with a woman of mixed-race ancestry to supply
their Adderley Street store with two bunches of wildflowers weekly.¹ By the 1890s, the kerbside at this bustling location, near the central post office and rail station, was reportedly lined with ‘baskets, buckets, and baths crammed with heaths, arum lilies, sugar-bushes, and chincherinchees.’² An undated watercolour by Charles E Peers captures the vigorous trade that had become entrenched at Trafalgar Place by the early twentieth century.

Numerous artists depicted Cape Town’s flower sellers, among them photographer Minna Keene and painters Maggie Laubser and Irma Stern. Tretchikoff, despite arriving later to the subject, compensated by prolifically depicting this vibrant trade. In 1949 alone, he created three works titled Flower Seller. One depicts a woman balancing a flower basket on her head sold at Strauss & Co in 2024 for R 2 173 125. Another portrays a young Muslim boy selling floral bunches. Across these works, including the present lot, Tretchikoff’s frontal view of his subjects is striking. His paintings function like candid snapshots, emphasising graphic statements and vivid colours over modernist experimentation.

The present lot includes an intriguing detail: three drops of water on the table. This lachrymose device, borrowed from Tretchikoff’s
celebrated Lost Orchid (1948), became a source of both fame and frustration, as devoted clients often requested their inclusion in other compositions.³ Beyond this aesthetic flourish, the painting is significant for the social history it evokes. Many of the flower sellers Tretchikoff
depicted likely lived in the Constantia Valley, near the artist’s later home in the elite suburb of Bishopscourt.

‘They have been there for generations and have supplied the markets of Cape Town with their flowers for many years,’ reported a state owned magazine in 1956.⁴ The enforcement of the Group Areas Act in the 1960s displaced these sellers, many from the Strawberry Lane
area of Constantia Valley. Land claims persist. This unresolved history is a vital lens through which to appreciate Tretchikoff’s evocative time-capsule study of a bygone flower seller.

^1. Lizette Rabe (2010) ‘Living history: The story of Adderley Street’s flower sellers’, South African Journal of Cultural History, 24(1): pages 83–104.
^2. Conrad Lighton (1960) Cape Floral Kingdom, Cape Town: Juta, page 8
^3. Vladimir Tretchikoff and Anthony Hocking (1973) Pigeon’s Luck, London: Collins, page 193.
^4. – (1956) ‘Buy my flowers’, South African Panorama, Pretoria: South African Information Service, May, page 40.