Jacobus hendrik pierneef biography of martin

oil on canvas

Artwork date: 1955
Signature details: shipshape and dated

(1)

76 x 91.5 cm

Notes:

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JH Pierneef was born in Pretoria in 1886, the year that Johannesburg was founded. His father, Gerrit, built the first house in the new town. His mother was the daughter of a Voortrekker. His godfather, sculptor Anton van Wouw, encouraged him to pursue art. Painter Frans Oerder introduced him to painting in oils and George Smithard taught him both etching and woodblock printing. (Self exiled) Pierneef received some art tuition at the Rotterdam Academy during the Boer War and in 1900, he studied drawing under an architect at Hilversum. At the age of 17, Pierneef carried on with night classes in drawing even while pursuing outside employment, first in a tobacco shop, then the State Library, and then a paint factory. At the age of 27 he hosted his first solo exhibition. He went on to draw illustrations for Die Brandwag magazine. He exhibited as a member of The Individualists Group and lectured at tertiary level. In 1929, he was commissioned to paint 32 panels for Park Station in Johannesburg – a project which gained him significant exposure both nationally and internationally. Pierneef’s style was inspired largely by the clear perception and simplification of San rock paintings. The South African countryside as his subject-matter, his work came to represent the country’s growing s

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Notes

The mountain landscapes near Ficksburg, in the eastern Free State, recur as subjects in JH Pierneef’s work from his important middle period (1925-35). His painterly descriptions of especially the Maloti Mountains (also spelled Maluti) encompass a range of styles, from the impressionistically descriptive to the formally experimental. Evident throughout, though, is Pierneef’s fidelity to place and architectonic approach to composing space (“a mathematical precision of line and colour,” as he put it in a 1926 interview).¹ This painting, with its receding foreground of jaggedly tiled greens and browns, predates his monumental study of the same range for his Station Panels series, unveiled in Johannesburg in 1932. Similar to that better-known work, which features theatrical clouds and mountains resembling ground molars, the scene is descriptive of a verifiable landscape. Locatable as it is, the landscape bears an unmistakable Pierneef imprimatur.

Pierneef’s quest to define an authentic personal style was hard won and informed by larger forces. The artist was 23 when the Union of South Africa was founded as a dominion of the British Empire in 1910. This watershed event, which united disparate groupings of peoples and political territories unde