Notes

Sheila Cussons (1922 – 2004) was an Afrikaans poet, born on Moravia Missionary Station, near Piketberg. She studied Fine Arts at University of Natal (Pietermaritzburg campus) and furthered her studies in the 1940s in London and Amsterdam. At the time, Jean Welz, considered her “an exceptional talent”. She was one of the most important poets in Afrikaans, besides being an accomplished painter and artist. She always deemed herself to be an visual artist in the first instance, and a poet second. 

Publishing 11 volumes of poetry in her lifetime she received all the major literary prizes, often twice and some thrice. Her completed poems was published as Versamelde gedigte in 2006 and last year her completed poems and prose, Versamelde werk, was published.  Her work has been translated in English and European languages.

 An retrospective exhibition of her paintings and etchings was presented at the Association of Arts (Western Cape) in Cape Town in 1984, at the Word fest, Stellenbosch and at the Volksblad art festival Bloemfontein in 2003. 

This desk dates back to 1946 when she bought it in Amsterdam. She made her first etchings and wrote some of her first poems on this desk. At the time she had a love relationship with the poet N P van Wyk Louw and she noted that he also wrote some of his poems, later to be published as Klipwerk on this desk.

In 1956 she moved to Barcelona where she married a Spanish businessman and artist.  When she returned to South Africa in 1981 she brought the desk with her and she kept it in her room at Nazareth House, a Catholic institution in Cape Town where she died in 2004 at the age of 82.  

Provenance