Notes

Clément Sénèque, the gifted, Durban-raised painter-architect, moved to Paris in 1921. He enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts and, while participating in several Paris salons, and staging a solo show at the Maison des Artistes in 1924, remained under the sway of the architect and town planner, Alfred Agache. After marrying in Paris, he produced a small, beautiful and honeymoon-inspired group of French Alpine oils, to which this work belongs. No doubt aware of post-war avantgardes, Sénèque reduced his mountainside to innumerable, dense, colour-shifting strips of paint. Remarkably, the steep ascent of the alp is suggested by nothing other than short, angled brushstrokes: shadow still seems to settle in the chasms and along the ridges, but the peak catches the sunlight as it should.

Sénèque returned to Durban mid-1925, perhaps in the same month, coincidentally, that Pierneef began his eye-opening tour of Europe. Having spent time in London, Paris, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Bruges, Dusseldorf, Berlin and Munich, and having met the influential Willem van Konijnenburg and Anton Hendriks, Pierneef returned to South Africa early in 1926, via the north and east coasts of Africa. Lot 254 would have been painted on this return journey, and catches the artist’s on-board view from the freighter, SS Toba, across to Algiers. A related drawing survives, thankfully, and remains part of the Pierneef archive at the Museum of Cultural History in Pretoria. Out-and-out seascapes by the artist are of course particularly rare. Kus van Algiers brings to mind another example – a view towards the Sierra Nevada off the Spanish Coast, now at La Motte – which would have been sketched only days prior to the present lot.