Strauss & co - 10 October 2016, Cape Town

555 Walter Whall BATTISS SOUTH AFRICAN 1 906-1982 After the Bathe signed; inscribed with the artist’s name, title and ‘exhibited international art exhibition Johannesburg 1955’ in another hand on the reverse oil on canvas 41 by 51cm R140 000–180 000 PROVENANCE The Jack Lugg Collection In the early 1950s Walter Battiss developed an interest in rock art, an art form he had encountered as a boy. Subsequently mentored by Erich Mayer, Battiss became a systematic South African rock art researcher, even going so far as contacting Wilhelm Bleek’s widow, Dorothea, to enquire about possible sites her husband and his co-researcher, Lucy Lloyd, had not covered. Previously unexplored terrain included the Northern and North-eastern Limpopo valley and the South-eastern parts of the then Rhodesia. As art master at Pretoria Boys High School, Battiss' visits to these areas were restricted to school holidays. He kept meticulous diaries and notebooks of these travels in the early 1950s and his research culminated in the publication of his famous book, Limpopo , in 1965. After the Bathe depicts a scene from this period and is an early example of what later became Battiss’s signature style, the so-called sgraffito-style of the 1960s, where he literally scratched images into thick layers of paint. 229