Notes

Enigmatic, talented, gentle, and for too long overlooked, Moses Tladi, one of the earliest black landscape painters working in a Western tradition, produced a small and enchanting body of work, characterised by lonely hillocks, flowering trees, shaded valleys, neat dwellings, and quiet skies. The scumbled surfaces of his paintings, their evocative and golden light, their offbeat colour combinations, and their mood of rural charm, brought him interwar acclaim, and he
became the first black artist to exhibit at the South African National Gallery in Cape Town in 1931. While his reputation sunk into obscurity after his death in 1959, a major travelling retrospective of his work, appropriately titled Moses Tladi Unearthed, has brought his vivid and weighty landscapes back into the public imagination.