Strauss & co - 15 March 2010, Cape Town

128 The impact of the South African war, or more specifically, the second Anglo-Boer war (1899 – 1902) was deeply felt amongst South Africans when Van Wouw produced this bronze in 1907, capturing the moment when two Boer fighters, worn out from the battle against insurmountable odds, hear the ‘bad news’of the loss of independence of their Republics. Van Wouw articulated this loss in very personal terms: “Vir die een man is alles verlore en hy soek instinkmatig steun by sy sterker wapenbroeder; die ander een voel dat alles eers verlore is as die moed verlore is”. [For one man everything is lost and he instinctively searches for support from his stronger brother-in-arms; the other one feels that everything is lost when courage is lost.] The two exhausted men lean on one another for physical and emotional support, in a complex elliptical composition that leads the eye around and over the sculpture, encouraging closer observation. Their faces reveal expressions haunted by grief and dejection, making the sculpture both a tribute to extraordinary courage and a powerful evocation of terrible loss. Attention to detail both attests to the sculptor’s virtuosity and enhances the meanings of the work. The lizard, on the rock behind the two fighters, indicates how long they have been sitting there, immobilised by despondency. Their wearied expressions, the worn-out shoes and the bandolier with only two bullets remaining are evidence of Van Wouw’s ability to put naturalism in the service of emotional expression. According to Hans Fransen “he was a naturalist through and through, achieving in his sculptures an authenticity and feeling for texture and surface detail which is unequalled”. 1 Van Wouw is acknowledged as one of South Africa’s foremost sculptors. This edition of Bad News was cast in Italy at the foundry of Giovanni Massa by founders and patineurs whose extraordinary skills captured to perfection the fine detail and finish of Van Wouw’s original 335 Anton vanWouw S OUTH A FRICAN 1862-1945 Bad News signed and inscribed, S A Joh-burg 1907, and ‘FOUNDRY G. MASSA. ROMA’ bronze, on a wooden base good brown patination height: 32,5cm R1 200 000 – 1 400 000 PROVENANCE Purchased from the artist by the current owner’s father LITERATURE A. E. Duffey, Anton van Wouw: The Smaller Works, Protea Book House, Pretoria, 2008, p53-55, illustration of another cast on dust cover model. This is only the third example of an Italian cast of Bad News to be sold at auction over the last forty years. The last example, sold in May 1988, was formerly in the collection of Sir Lionel Philips. According to Professor Dr Alexander Duffey, Bad News was exhibited during Van Wouw’s first review exhibitions in Johannesburg and Pretoria in July 1908 and also in 1909 during a review exhibition at the Fine Art Society Galleries in London. The earliest illustration of it appears in the periodical Hollandisch Zuid-Afrika of 15 July 1910, where it is called Slechte tijding (Bad tidings) . Duffey considered the sculpture of such significance that he illustrated another cast on the jacket cover of his book, Van Wouw: The Small Sculptures (2008), which remains the seminal text on the artist. 2 1. Hans Fransen, Three Centuries of South African Art. Donker, Johannesburg, 1982, p325. 2. A E Duffey, Anton van Wouw: The Smaller Works. Protea Book House, Pretoria, 2008, jacket cover and pp53-55.