Pierneef’s Namibian works up for sale

Few artists have captured the public imagination quite like the revered landscape painter and traveller J. H. Pierneef (1886-1957), whose coveted work is the subject of a single-artist auction organised by Strauss & Co on Tuesday, 12 July 2022.
Comprising etchings, linocuts, drawings, watercolours, caseins and oil paintings made between 1913 and 1955, JH Pierneef: En Route offers collectors an insight into this Pretoria-born artist’s busy travel itinerary over five decades.
The very important upcoming sale features numerous works depicting Namibia.
“More often than not, Henk Pierneef was on the move,” says Dr Alastair Meredith, Strauss & Co’s art department head and an expert in earlier twentieth-century South African art.
“His paintings might have been refined or modernised in the studio, but he found his greatest inspiration passing through his beloved southern African landscape. Pierneef roamed far and wide. Our catalogue presents a visual journey that takes in McGregor, the Westcliff Ridge, Rooiplaat, Entabeni, the Malutis, Stellenbosch, the Soutpansberg, Pontdrif and Shingwedzi, as well as such contrasting sites as the wild Erongos, exotic Zanzibar and genteel Bruges.”
Following the model of Strauss & Co’s inaugural and successful sale devoted to Pierneef in 2021 (100% lots sold), this collection charts Pierneef’s many travel destinations through a chronological survey of his commanding output. The sale culminates with a magnificent late painting from 1954, Mbweni, Zanzibar (estimated at between N$3 and N$4 million).
Iconic
In the 1920s and 30s Pierneef added Cape mountains and coastal scenes to his repertoire of places seen and rendered, and from 1923 he also repeatedly visited Namibia. Painted in 1936, The Close of Day, Erongo Mountains, S. W. A. (estimate N$2 – 3 million) depicts a well-known landmark in Namibia in thin layers of mauve, grey and purple.
Acquired from the artist by the influential Schweikherdt family and subsequently reproduced as a print, the painting is one of Pierneef’s most iconic landscape scenes
As is to be expected, the collection also includes a fine selection of the artist’s majestic bushveld scenes, of which the late work from 1955, Shingwedzi, Kruger Wildtuin (estimate NY1.5 – 2 million) is a fine example. Pierneef’s many boat trips to Europe, some via the Indian Ocean route, also enabled him to render scenes beyond Southern Africa, including the Tanzanian archipelago of Zanzibar and Belgium town of Bruges.
Pierneef in Namibia
While in Stellenbosch in 1921, Pierneef met Hans Aschenborn. The German-trained painter, who had settled in the then South West Africa in 1909 and who greatly admired Pierneef’s work, encouraged him to visit his adopted country and to paint it. Descriptions of the country by literati then in Stellenbosch, particularly Toon van den Heever and P Bruchhausen, also piqued the artist’s interest.
Pierneef arrived in Namibia late in April 1923, initially staying with Toon van den Heever.
He was immediately captivated by the endless horizons, the silence, the dry air, flawless skies, subtly patterned deserts, and lonely mountains suffused with violet light. He travelled the country tirelessly, worked breathlessly, and produced enough pictures over an eight-week period to mount a sell-out exhibition in Windhoek that opened on 20 June 1923.
The majority of the pictures were small in scale – his travelling painter’s box could only accommodate small boards – and most were characterised by rich, dusky and dramatic pinks.
Pierneef’s Namibian pictures are shot through with an electric glow. He certainly delighted in the shifting colours and shadows over the landscape as the sun arced through a clear, vast sky. The surfaces he painted were expressive and often calligraphic, a trait he shared with Adolph Jentsch – another painter synonymous with the country – who arrived there in 1938, fifteen years after Pierneef’s first visit.
“Pierneef’s search for natural harmony, his knack for neat design, his flair for monumental drama, and his pleasure in exquisite colouring, made him a distinctive landscapist, a modernist master, and a deeply cherished icon,” says Meredith, whose detailed notes also enliven the extensive e-catalogue supporting JH Pierneef: En Route.
The live virtual sale will be held in Johannesburg on Tuesday, 12 July 2022.