Strauss & co - 13 November 2017, Johannesburg

19 The highveld is a prominent subject of South African arts and letters. The grassy plains of the country’s inland plateau, a high-lying region functionally named the hoëveld by early Boer farmers who used it for stock grazing, have occupied artists as diverse as JH Pierneef, John Koenakeefe Mohl and William Kentridge. The use of the word highveld is now so naturalised that one forgets its long usage in English. The 1879 edition of lexicographer James Stormonth’s Etymological and Pronouncing Dictionary of the English Language defined it as the ‘plains above the altitude of thorns’. This antique definition is useful in highlighting the physiographic meaning of the word. Over time, though, the highveld has also come to refer to the physical landscapes of Johannesburg, Pretoria and the surrounding areas. The selection of works offered here encompasses both definitions. The lots on offer range from bucolic studies of the highveld’s long, gently tilting landscapes to works descriptive of urban settlement and industry. The earliest work on offer, Frans Oerder’s Farm Bezuidenhout (c.1890s), embraces both meanings. Oerder immigrated to South Africa in 1890, and initially lived on the farm Doornfontein, in present-day central Johannesburg, before moving to Pretoria. In lieu of board and lodging Oerder gifted the farm’s owner, Frederick Jacobus Bezuidenhout, a painting of his rural homestead, a landscape soon to be erased by industrialisation. John Meyer and Walter Meyer are contemporary heirs to the rustic naturalism of Oerder. Urbanism and the ambiguities of progress are important themes in the works of Mohl, Kentridge, Gerard Sekoto and Moses Tladi. The latter two artists were both born on the verdant eastern cusp of the highveld, Tladi painting in a traditional landscape idiom where Sekoto was more a social portraitist. JH Pierneef is an acknowledged master of the rural highveld landscape. As Esmé Berman noted: ‘For him the highveld plateau and the bushveld were never merely aggregations of soil and rocks and vegetation. He looked beyond the surface of the scenery and perceived a structural system, which he then translated into distinctive formal compositions.’ 1 A similar affection and understanding of the harsh light that bathes this high-lying landscape characterises the lots by Ernst de Jong and Cecil Skotnes. 1. Esmé Berman, Painting in South Africa , Johannesburg: Southern Book Publishers, 1993, p.50 Lots 23, 25, 34, 100, 119, 162, 187, 206, 236, 238, 305, 308, 327, 328, 375 and 389 Highveld Landscapes Lot 236 Cecil Skotnes Highveld Landscape