Provenance

Johan Coetzee Gallery, Stellenbosch.

Private Collection.

Notes

Starting in the late 1940s, Jacob Hendrik Pierneef repeatedly visited the coastal town of Struisbaai to draw and paint. Located north of Cape Agulhas in the Overberg region, Struisbaai has long been noted for its attractive examples of traditional Cape fishing cottages, situated on a rocky headland above the modern holiday homes below. Known as Hotagterklip, this architectural complex today comprises nine restored cottages with whitewashed walls, thatched roofs, half-doors, and chimneystacks.

When Pierneef visited in 1948 and 1950, the cottages were in a state of disrepair. The present lot, part of a small suite of masterful architectural studies in oil, depicts their traditional rough-stone construction. The Cape’s architectural heritage has long been a subject of artistic and publishing interest. In the years following Pierneef’s visit, heritage experts such as Count Cosmo de Bosdari, Hans Fransen and Mary Cook all visited Hotagterklip. De Bosdari, for example, dismayed by the “prosaic holiday resort” that had erased the traditional cottages nearer the beach, described Hotagterklip in 1971 as “a charming little cluster of huts with beautifully textured walls, again in extremely picturesque, almost Mediterranean arrangements.”¹

Pierneef’s painting surpasses this warm description. It is also a fine example of Pierneef – the quintessential Transvaal painter of savannah landscapes –successfully engaging with an older subject in the canon of South African landscape painting: the Cape coastal scene. An accomplished draughtsman, Pierneef lavishes considerable attention on the detailing of the two cottages. His talent for graphic description is self-evident, but his restrained colour palette is equally noteworthy. His brush captures the elemental earth tones of the cottage walls – run-down yet resolute beneath the threatening grey-blue-white clouds. The overall scene reflects his on-going fascination, at age 64, with the resilient persistence and everyday textures of rural life.

¹ C De Bosdari (1971) Cape Dutch Houses and Farms, Cape Town: AA Balkema, page 109.