Strauss & co - 8 October 2009, Cape Town

129 262 Bertha Amy Everard S OUTH A FRICAN 1873-1965 Cornfields, Kimpton signed oil on canvas 45 by 68cm R100 000 – 150 000 LITERATURE cf Frieda Harmsen, The Women of Bonnefoi, The Story of the Everard Group, van Schaik, Pretoria, 1980, p 94, where a similar painting is illustrated. Bertha Everard’s compelling Cornfields (which hangs in the Tatham Art Gallery in Pietermaritzburg) was painted in 1924 when Bertha and her two daughters spent the summer painting wheatlands near Kimpton, a little village in Hertfordshire. This painting “reads as a pleasurable exercise, and it reveals the artist’s intuitive skill in placing expressive brush strokes and orchestrating colour. Both paint and pigment are rich, the golden yellows, dark veridians and violet-tinged blues redolent of full, sultry summer.”pp 94 - 95