Strauss & co - 20 May 2019, Johannesburg

121 Few South African sculptures have as rich a provenance as the imposing, time-burnished bronze maquette for the Paul Kruger Monument. Fewer still are so entwined in the histories of the Transvaal Republic; its folkloric, top-hatted president; the Second Anglo-Boer War; and the backroom, helter-skelter, treasure-bargaining years before the Union. It is also remarkable that such an item, forever in private hands, should now go on view to the public for the first time in well over a century. In 1895, Sammy Marks (1844–1920), the shrewd entrepreneur and Kruger confidant, provided the necessary funding to erect a permanent monument to the Transvaal’s president in Pretoria’s Church Square. His enormously generous gift of £10 000 would first-and-foremost cover the production costs of the statue, while any excess would go towards public improvements for the city. Such a prestigious public commission naturally caught the attention of Anton van Wouw who, incidentally, having arrived in the Transvaal in 1890, lived on the same street at the president. He quickly set to work on a small-scale model of the monument to be considered by Marks, the Pretoria City Council, and Kruger himself. This model is well-known from a number of contemporary photographs, and it clearly pleased the president: Van Wouw was awarded the commission in October 1897. The artist’s concept was grand, ambitious, and in the spirit of the finest public monuments of early modern Europe. Bringing to mind Pietro Tacca’s Monument of the Four Moors (1626) in Livorno, for instance, Van Wouw’s design set Kruger atop a slender, square-edged pedestal, and placed four Boer soldiers on a quadratic base below, each of them crouching and armed. Four high-relief panels were also to be set into the sides of the plinth. While initially considering a studio in Holland, Van Wouw eventually modelled each of the five major figures in Rome over a number of months between 1897 and 1898. Each was colossal. The squatting Boer soldiers – a pair of contemporary types, and a pair from the Great Trek – stood 7ft high, while Kruger measured a full 14ft in his boots and top hat. The casting in bronze was left to the master Roman foundryman, Franciscus Bruno. By the time Van Wouw arrived back in Pretoria late in 1898, the monument’s base and pedestal had been prepared. Due to the outbreak of war some months later, however, the completed bronze figures, as well as the four accompanying relief panels, were impounded in Delagoa Bay, their enormous crates loaded into the warehouse of the London-registered African Boating Company. With Pretoria under British sway, and the guerrilla Boers forever on-the-run, Kruger’s monument seemed doomed. Sensing an opportunity, Lord Kitchener of Khartoum left :  Van Wouw’s studio c.1896, with the initial maquette for the Kruger monument. His great friend, Frans Oerder, paints alongside him. above :  Rudolf Steger’s photograph used for a postcard, December 1904. Photo credit: Anton vanWouw Archive, Pretoria