Strauss & co - September 2026 Highlights

Although best known for her portraits and still lifes, Irma Stern was a prolific painter who also consistently worked in the genres of landscape and the nude. Her marine paintings, in which themes of landscape and labour frequently converge, form a substantial yet comparatively overlooked aspect of her output. Throughout her career she repeatedly returned to harbours, beach- es and coastal settlements, depicting both the rhythms of maritime work and the changing character of life along Atlantic and Mediterranean shorelines. Biography offers one explanation for this enduring interest. From childhood, Stern crossed regularly between South Africa and Europe by sea, and harbours became recurring points of arrival and departure in her life. One of the final images reproduced in her private journal, covering the years 1919 to 1924 and published posthumously in 1991, depicts Cape Town seen from Table Bay in gradations of black, accompanied by the evocative German caption: “And the sea roared through my dreams.”1(fig 1) Stern’s early sketchbooks include numerous depictions of harbours, but a transformative three-month stay in Madeira in 1931 saw the subject assume a central place in her oil painting. The visit yielded a number of assured harbour scenes, notably an exceptional colourist work depicting three anonymous figures flanked by vividly decorated wooden fishing boats (fig 2). Acquired by the collectors Anton and Huberte Rupert, it was later lent to the 1967 memorial exhibition of Stern’s work in London, where the present lot was also exhibited.2 Following her first visit to Zanzibar in 1939, Stern produced a steady stream of gouaches and oils depicting harbours at Alicante, Istanbul and Venice, as well as scenes descriptive of Cape Town and PROVENANCE Fabian Fine Art, Cape Town. Private Collection. EXHIBITED Grosvenor Gallery, London, Irma Stern Memorial Exhibition , 14 March to 15 April 1967, cat. no. 61. LITERATURE Neville Dubow (1974) Irma Stern , Cape Town: C Struik Publishers, illustrated in colour on the cover. Marion Arnold (1995) Irma Stern: A Feast for the Eye , Cape Town: Fernwood Press, illustrated in colour on page 87. (fig 1) Neville Dubow (1991) Paradise: The Journal and Letters (1917–1993) of Irma Stern, Cape Town: Chameleon Press, pages 51-52.