Strauss & co - 20 May 2019, Johannesburg

83 171 Joachim Schönfeldt SOUTH AFRICAN 1958– Roedean School Blossoms in Situ, Plein Air, Summer 2018/9, Johannesburg inscribed with the artist’s name, the date and the title on the reverse oil and varnish on hand-made Oregon pine/meranti wood panel height: 71,5 cm R50 000 – 70 000 Painted in the garden of Roedean School, Johannesburg, plein air. The proceeds from the sale of this lot will benefit the Roedean School Bursary Fund. This panel, with five flowers from the beautiful gardens of Roedean School for Girls in Johannesburg, is part of Schönfeldt’s larger body of work, Documentary Stills , in which he draws up an inventory and creates a sense of order and a system of identification and interpretation. In each of Joachim Schönfeldt’s painted panels, an interlacing wooden strip coils infinitively around upon itself, enclosing five convex, circular shields on which five different vignettes are painted. In the present Lot, the artist has painted five different flowers from the school’s gardens, tended for over 35 years by the indefatigable garden expert Anne Lorentz. Included are the noble but alien rose, and the humble indigenous mallow. The flowers reference the diversity, youth and promise of the girls who attend the school, as well as the natural rhythms of life and society beyond the campus. Schönfeldt painted the flowers from life, en plein air , that is, out of the studio, following a practice pioneered by the Barbizon school of painters in nineteenth-century France, and made possible by the invention of paint tubes by Windsor & Newton in 1841, and the portable easel, first displayed at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851. 173 Diederick During SOUTH AFRICAN 1917–1991 African Figure signed; signed on the reverse oil on board 61,5 by 41 cm R50 000 – 70 000 172 Fred Page SOUTH AFRICAN 1908–1984 Ghostly Street Scene signed and dated ‘64 oil on canvas laid down on board 75 by 50 cm R70 000 – 100 000 PROVENANCE Estate Late Mrs Sonia Lapin 173 172 171