Strauss & co - 2017 Highlights

30 East Buttress Drakensburg and Mont Aux Sources  1934 mixed media on card 72 x 28 cm Shortly after Pierneef’s eponymous Johannesburg Railway Station panels were installed in 1933 the artist, together with other South African artists, Coert Steynberg, Eleanor Esmonde-White, Le Roux Smith Le Roux and Jan Juta, was commissioned to design murals for South Africa House on Trafalgar Square in London in 1935. As these two works will attest, the studies Pierneef made for these murals became the source of numerous subsequent easel paintings, but these later works are executed with greater intimacy than the more decorative quality required for the large scale works. Sir Herbert Baker, architect of South Africa House, wrote to the then High Commissioner, Charles te Water, that Pierneef ‘seems to have made rather too much of the mountain background and not enough of the more peaceful beauty of the valleys: in other words, the effect of his pictures may be to attract the adventurer and lover of wild scenery but not those who like the beauty of the peaceful cultivated valleys.’