Notes

This painting beautifully showcases Jacob Hendrik Pierneef’s ability to evoke quietude and wonder in his depictions of rural landscapes.
Painted in the artist’s late fifties, it is a symphony of harmonious colours – rust reds, sun bleached yellows, dusty pinks – that conjure the stark yet luxuriant beauty of the southern Waterberg region, northwest of Pretoria. A site of continuous human habitation for millennia, Boer administrators once considered the region a forlorn outpost. Malaria and tsetse flies were commonplace, as were poverty and frugality. “Give him a farm in the Waterberg,” Paul Kruger is reputed to have remarked of troublesome citizens.

In 1913, the poet C Louis Leipoldt toured the Waterberg as a government medical inspector, investigating school conditions. He later wrote
of the numerous grievances that shaped daily life in the area.¹ However, the Thabazimbi region underwent significant transformation following the discovery of a large iron-ore reef in 1919 and the subsequent opening of a commercial mine in 1931. This evolving social history would undoubtedly have been familiar to Pierneef, a frequent traveller to bushveld regions north of Pretoria since his teens.

This work is part of a vibrant series of oil paintings and drawings from 1943 that depict the mineral-rich landscapes of Rustenburg and Thabazimbi with stylised elegance. Pierneef’s fondness for autumnal browns and sunset pinks is also evident in other compositions, such as Thabazimbi, Rustenburg (1943). The Waterberg biome, with its extensive savannah and acacia trees, provided the artist with a wealth of familiar motifs. Yet in this composition, these iconic trees are relegated to the receding middle ground.

In the foreground, flanking the dry riverbed, appears a Tamboti tree on the right and, on the opposite side, rising above the dry reeds, a Silver Cluster-Leaf (Vaalboom). While the specificity of the flora is worth debating, Pierneef was neither a dendrologist nor a naturalist. Rather, he was an artist deeply moved by the wild, physical terrain that inspired as well as replenished his work.

^1. Sandra Swart (2004) ‘Bushveld Magic’ and ‘Miracle Doctors’: An Exploration of Eugène Marais and C. Louis Leipoldt’s Experiences in the Waterberg, South Africa, c. 1906-1917’, The Journal of African History, 45(2): pages 237–255, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4100466, accessed 22 January 2025.