Strauss & co - 21 October 2013, Cape Town

696 Jacob Hendrik PIERNEEF SOUTH AFRICAN 1886-1957 Rooi Sering signed; inscribed with the title on the reverse in another hand oil on canvas 44,5 by 60cm R800 000 – 1 000 000 NOTES Acquired from the artist by the current owner’s grandfather who lived next to Pierneef in Pretoria, and thence by descent. Inscribed on paper adhered to the reverse with the title and ‘Geskenk aan my dogter Annelize op haar 10de verjaarsdag 27 Mei 1962, JL Le Grange’. The Rooi Sering or Burkea Africana is known by many common names including Wild Seringa and is found across Gauteng, Limpopo, Mpumalanga and the North West provinces of South Africa. In Pierneef’s painting the Rooi Sering becomes a bold statement of intent. The composition is anchored by the massive tree whose grandeur and huge canopy of leaves capture attention and lead the eye through a vast landscape beneath a soaring sky studded with white-rimmed clouds. Savannah grasses and distant trees are all crisply defined in the bright sunlight. In Pierneef’s oeuvre trees are significant. They are emblematic of his art where trees are both an active defining principle used to structure the composition and the key elements in conveying symbolic information. In his influential book on the Johannesburg Station Panels, Nic Coetzee points out that trees have a special place in the work of Pierneef, expanding on the thesis that the tree is a potent and complex symbol: ‘The tree can be seen as an encapsulation of Nature, symbolically spanning many generations. Like an art that remains representational but ostensibly signifying intangible, universal ideas, trees are rooted in the past but reach into the future: anchored in the earth, they extend to heaven.’ 1 1. Coetzee, N. J. (1992) Pierneef, Land and Landscape: The Johannesburg Station Panels in Context , Johannesburg: C B M Publishing. Page 21. 252