Notes

Houtdraers is listed as having been painted in 1929 in the catalogue of Maggie Laubser’s retrospective exhibition curated by Professor Matthys Bokhorst and mounted at the South African National Gallery in 1969, in conjunction with Dr Albert Werth of Pretoria Art Museum and Nel Erasmus, Director of the Johannesburg Art Gallery. In the introduction to the catalogue Gregoire Boonzaier wrote:
... it was her great interest in all that she saw around her on the farm that inspired her every day. Thus she became one of the first painters in this country to depict the farm-labourers and fisherfolk at their daily labour. Into her motifs were introduced a variety of fruit, flowers and animal-life which she knew so well.
This rich variety of subject-matter with which she had grown up, and which she loved and understood, she now portrayed for many years in a series of brilliant paintings in a style her very own.¹
1. Maggie Laubser: Retrospective Exhibition, South African National Gallery, Cape Town, 1969, unpaginated

Provenance

Acquired from the artist and thence by descent

Exhibited

South African National Gallery, Pretoria Art Museum and Johannesburg Art Gallery, Maggie Laubser: Retrospective Exhibition, 1969

Literature

Dalene Marais, Maggie Laubser, her paintings, drawings and graphics, Perskor, Johannesburg and Cape Town, 1994, page 287, Cat No 1154

Matthys Bokhorst (ed) with Introduction by Gregoire Boonzaier, Maggie Laubser: Retrospective Exhibition, Cat No 81