Notes

A Mountain Landscape with an Acacia Tree clearly reveals Jacob Hendrik Pierneef’s early exposure to European art movements and the ways in which he brought these new influences to bear in his definitive interpretations of the South African landscape. While in the Netherlands with his family from 1901 until 1903, Pierneef attended the Rotterdam art school, Academia Erasmiana, admired the Old Masters at the Boymans van Beuningen Museum and visited art exhibitions at local galleries.

However, it was during a second trip to Europe in 1925 and 1926 that he was able to pursue his interests in European Modernism through visits to museums and galleries and discussions with leading theorists and artists. Subsequently, according to Esmé Berman, he painted some of his most spontaneous impressionistic pictures and began to experiment with different styles.ⁱ

This landscape, painted in 1927, vividly demonstrates Pierneef’s explorations of the painting techniques of Divisionists such as Seurat and Post-Impressionists like Cézanne. Divisionism developed in the nineteenth century as artists discovered scientific theories of vision which encouraged a departure from the tenets of Impressionism. Instead of physically mixing pigments, colours were placed side by side in dots or patches, requiring the viewer to combine the colours optically. Thus, it was believed, maximum luminosity could be achieved.

Pierneef makes effective use of this technique of separate brushstrokes with distinct colours to record his visual sensations of colour. Individual daubs of russet, gold ochre, cadmium orange and citron capture the shimmering effects of the bright sunlight on the foreground landscape and the Acacia tree. By contrast, the sky is enlivened with larger brushstrokes loaded with modulated tones as utilised by Cézanne in his landscape paintings to achieve harmony through the repetition of subtle colours.

The spectacle of a lowveld scene in mid-summer is dramatically heightened through the parting of clouds that allows a shaft of bright light to illuminate the distant mountains making them almost evanescent. It provides a perfect display of Pierneef’s strong convictions that the formal elements of art be harnessed to express the spiritual dimension.

ⁱ Esmé Berman, Art & Artists of South Africa, A A Balkema, 1983, page 327.

Provenance

Prof A E du Toit, rector of the University of Pretoria from 1929 to 1934. It was in this period that he acquired this painting from the artist.