Hugo’s Flowering Namaqualand

The Flowering Namaqualand of Hugo Naudé – Nick van der Leek searches for the springtime of the artist’s soul…

Pictures: Nick van der Leek and Supplied

I’m looking at a modest-sized painting, 13.5cm x 17cm. Namaqualand Daisies is a masterpiece but it’s hard to say why. Pieter Hugo Naudé, a contemporary of Volschenk, has a gorgeous Van Gogh-like style. His simple brushstrokes and courageous palette imply a slumbering genius. But if this is more than mere Impressionism, what is it?

In Namaqualand Daisies, the field of flowers rises almost imperceptibly to the left, while simultaneously there’s a deepening intensity of colour, as subtle, guiding lines move the viewer towards the horizon. What secret lies beneath these compelling, open-air, perpetually springtime scenes?

To solve this puzzle we must start from a great distance away, and then we must look at individual pieces. All artists worth their salt have territories. Pierneef (1886-1957) had the monumental thunderstorm skies, arching camelthorn trees and geometric strata of the Northern Transvaal.

My great-grandfather Tinus de Jongh (1885-1942) luxuriated in the sun-drenched Cape Dutch homesteads and gold-plated mountains of the Western Cape. Claerhout (1919-2006) captured the sweaty, earthy characters inhabiting the sunflower fields of the Free State. WH Coetzer (1900-1983) assailed the Drakensberg, the rural backwoods and their local inhabitants, and the Great Trek.

For Pieter Wenning (1873-1921) it was the overgrown pioneer farms of early South Africa, for Boonzaaier (1909-2005) the streets of Cape Town, Bo Kaap and the coast, and for Keith Alexander (1946-1998), the shipwrecked dystopias of Namibia. There was occasionally an overlap, but for the most part, our legacies of original art were not just distinctive in their own right, but targeted to specific landscapes.

While Volschenk (1853-1936) was staking his claim on the lovely Langeberg around Riversdale, his next-door neighbour (not only geographically but historically) was Hugo Naudé. He was born in 1869 on the farm Aan-de-Doorns, and bred in the towering orchards of the Hex River Valley, and his world was the world of the farm. And what’s the most blessed time of year on a farm? Springtime, of course.

After attending school at Overhex and in Worcester, the 20-year-old Naudé joined the celebrated writer Olive Schreiner in 1889 on a trip to Europe. Schreiner not only recognised Naudé’s talent, but was actively involved in introducing her charge to an excellent network of artists, patrons and intellectuals.

One of these was Havelock Ellis, an English writer (and physician) who co-authored the first medical textbook in English on homosexuality, in 1897. Ellis recommended that Naudé attend the prestigious Slade School of Fine Art in London. Naudé also studied portraiture at the Kunstakademie in Munich under Franz von Lenbach. And so it goes on…

Of course there’s only so much you can learn about an artist in books. To really get to know these creative heads of state, we have to invade their territories. We have to have a first-hand experience of some quintessentially South African scene, and that means driving out into their distinctive territories, armed to the teeth with curiosity, our hearts and minds flung open.

It’s only once we’re outdoors and far from our domestic concerns, out of context as it were, that we’re awakened to some slippery but exquisite essence. Something resides here and only here. But where’s Naudé’s magical ‘here’? Worcester?

Naudé’s countless farmyard scenes were painted around this Western Cape town perched on today’s N1. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, this is where he grew up and where he settled with his wife. But I’m looking for a world that Naudé would have still recognised. It’s not here; it’s beyond traffic lights, parking lots and strip malls glowing beneath the stern faces of Worcester’s looming purple mountains.

If he were driving with me in the car, where would he have demanded we stop? Where would he have bathed in the absolute beauty of the countryside? And so I drive north, leaving behind the Cape and its grapes, its towers and its traffic, towards drier, dustier climes.

I spend the night at my aunt’s home in Velddrif, beside the Berg River. An artist herself, Joan Schrauwen finds the constant fluctuations of light on the water, on the sedge, and the liquid tides of birds, a kindling for her creativity. The next morning, equipped with instructions on where the best swathes of flowers are hiding, I set off.

On my way out of Velddrif I can’t help thinking there’s a clue to this mystery of Naudé’s Namaqualand Daisies in Joan’s fluid twilight scenes. The medium is different, but there’s something going on here that’s both deeply tangible and frustratingly intangible. What is it?

As I make my way up the West Coast, past Elandsbaai and the mountain cauldron of Vredendal, I feel a sort of slippage. Not just the day slipping but a lifetime, not just a lifetime but an entire generation. As I wander into the fringes of Namaqualand the day becomes a daze of flowers. The world transforms into a natural Garden of Eden, endless blooms stretching on and on for miles.

I drive all the way to Kleinsee over several days (about 100km short of Port Nolloth and the Namibian border) and, as each new floral landscape unfurls into view, I find myself struggling to fit it all into the camera viewfinder. That rich intensity of colour – even the world’s most powerful cameras struggle to comprehend such penetrating and pervasive lavishness. Surely it’s not real?

Increasingly I want to know Naudé’s technique for capturing these lovely scenes. This is the first time I’m seeing the Namaqualand flower show and it truly is a wonder. While I’m using a wide-angle lens, Naudé reduces the size of his canvas to something small and manageable. Then he infuses this with nature’s buzzing, oozing, beautiful diversity. This seems an almost mischievous trick, but it’s really a master craftsman, who has transferred his skill at portraiture to this loveliest of all landscapes. Instead of obsessing over technicality, instead of working within a particular school of art, Naudé focuses on the quality of what’s in front of him. His art goes beyond Impressionism and becomes intuitive.

Like in the face of a supermodel blown up, where we suddenly see freckles, pores, the curve of a nostril, and beneath her eyes a few tiny wrinkles. But none of that matters. What matters are the lines of her face, the light in her eyes. And so Naudé dispenses with details and finds the essence in the simple brushwork – colour, liveliness, the ebb and flow of the underlying fields.

There’s a turbid quality to some of his work. It speaks to the soul about how these flowers are suddenly here, there and everywhere, and then disappear entirely from the landscape. They must die in order to leave behind seeds that will bloom again next year.

The road lifts, revealing seams of colour. I find myself in high spirits here. I wonder, was Naudé a particularly happy artist that he loved these landscapes so? As struggling artists go, he was one of the luckier ones; his talent was recognised early and supported.

Others, like Pierneef, Tinus, Claerhout, Wenning, Baines and arguably even Keith Alexander, didn’t have it so simple or so easy. If it wasn’t parents who objected to the artistic dreams of their progeny, it was catastrophic setbacks, sabotage, fire or premature death that made life hard for most of them. Even Naudé’s neighbour Volschenk voluntarily sacrificed decades to a career before resuming his artistic journey.

In Esmé Berman’s excellent encyclopaedia, Art & Artists of South Africa, we see that ‘there were probably few artists in South Africa who were more popular as individuals than was Hugo Naudé. Even in his youthful days, pupils and friends would cluster around him and often in the evening he would entertain them at the piano, singing in a soft, melodious voice. As an artist he was more solitary, following his own direction and divorcing himself from current… practice’.

Naudé’s convivial personality also meant he would naturally gravitate towards people and portraiture. Some notable commissions included President Marthinus Steyn, General Louis Botha and Reverend Andrew Murray. But despite Naudé’s hoity-toity schooling in Europe, and even though he could easily have settled into high society when he returned to Cape Town, he preferred to paint farmyard scenes, especially the Cape coloureds going about their everyday chores.

What makes Hugo Naudé a standout star among the nine or so artists we’ve highlighted in COUNTRY LIFE so far, is he’s one of precious few (Naudé died in 1941) whose work has sold for well over R1 million. In 2011, a typical, bright, beautiful 40cm x 55cm oil called Namaqualand in Spring was auctioned by Strauss Art in Johannesburg for R1 559 600. Two years later a different scene, the smoking, darkly domestic Cape Kitchen Interior brought the hammer down at R891 200. Only one other landscape artist is comparably expensive, in my view, and that’s Pierneef.

Esmé Berman has it right when she says, “It’s somehow always springtime in Naudé’s small canvases.”Perhaps this is because Naudé was the first South African artist to adapt his style to the idiosyncrasies of the local landscape – in other words, the sunlit atmosphere, the vivid colours, the penetrating blue skies and expansive, heartbreak-beautiful vistas. It takes great courage, of course, to do this, and a lot of nerve to take on flowers en masse as he did.

A Maggie Laubser still life of a flower in a pot or a vase is one thing; a field of flowers is a sort of sensory overload that requires a special eye, and a special soul to capture it in an authentic way. If Hugo Naudé was the first to adapt his style to the sunlight, others soon followed, but none could do Namaqualand quite like he could.

Now I’ve left Namaqualand and her unbelievable fields far behind, yet they linger in me like a dream, like a good meal. On my way back, when I reach Langebaan, the emerald lagoon – with its flamingos in the shallows and flowers bobbing on the adjacent peninsula – calls to me. I stop. I look and listen. And then come the nagging questions, ‘This is more than mere Impressionism, but what is it? What secret lies beneath these open-air, eternally spring scenes?’ When the answer steals on me there’s no pang of revelation, just a soothing sense of knowing, after a long and eventful journey.

What is it in Naudé’s art that’s more than Impressionism?

Besides intuition, there’s beauty in modesty. There’s beauty in telling without embellishing. The best photo needs no enhancements; it is perfectly what it is. When the unembellished can’t be improved on and yet its beauty is unparalleled, that is something rare. And that’s what I think Naudé found here, in heartbreaking abundance.

Reality inspires us more eloquently than anything else, and art that is true to the inner as well as the outer landscape evokes this inspiration best. It calls to us. It says come out here into the world and see; see for yourself, and see yourself here. See how beautiful the real world can be just as it is, and see how beautiful you are in the world, just as you are.

What secret lies beneath these scenes?

The soil of simplicity. Naudé’s Namaqualand is down-to-earth, sunlit and spacious. It doesn’t need to be more than that to be majestic. What can be more magnificent than the bursting of spring in full blush?

Naudé didn’t take weeks to complete his masterpieces but made them in a flourish at a single sitting. He allowed a fleeting moment to overtake him, to awaken him. And in a single energetic session he put it all in there, the oozing life, the subtle, guiding lines, the distant mountains and elevated horizon. What he’s doing is evocative rather than imitative, but it’s sufficiently imitative that if you went in search of his intuitions, you’d find them, just as I have.

I think that, because Naudé was a happy artist who led a good and fruitful life, Namaqualand as a muse made absolute sense. What Naudé recognised was the springtime inside himself, inside everyone. It comes and goes and yet its seeds are always there.

Once Upon a Wenning

Widely considered the forerunner of Cape Impressionism, Pieter Wenning’s dreamy, poetic scenes point towards a longing for a home and a peaceful place to live out his life, in the safety and bounty of nature…

Words: Nick van der leek

In my journey to find Pieter Wenning, I head to the Cape. But Pieter Wenning is not easy to find. His life and works predate those of great artists that followed him, including the likes of Pierneef and Tinus de Jongh. I soon labour under the impression that the subjects he painted have long since disappeared.

It’s easy to believe, driving through the suburbs of Cape Town, that his serene country homes and farmyards – the centrepieces of the first farms, places teeming with life, and brimming with Frontier Feel – have disappeared entirely. These were homes hewn by hands, their materials drawn from hillsides and surrounding brush; the floors unearthed from nearby clays and cow dung, the first roofs invariably yellow thatch skirts rising towards a smoking chimney.

These were the days when streams could be used for washing, and irons were heated in a fire. When passers-by were red-coated soldiers, sailors, or slaves and getting around was on foot, by horse, by train or by ship. Meat had to be shot for dinner. Cows had to be milked for cream and butter. Bread was home-baked. Eggs, still warm, had to be fetched from the coop.

Wenning’s work was all about painting an expanding frontier. But unlike Tinus and Pierneef, he was less preoccupied with monumental backdrops. Instead, Wenning became absorbed, even intoxicated, by the almost fairytale simplicity of the frontier. Its beautiful, humble beginnings. Its deep, rustic connection to nature.

His pictures have the dreamy quality of being filled with colour and light, yet remain somehow unfocused and vague. Yet his subjects are unmistakably the first homes of the earliest settlements. Nature is abundant. Green is splashed everywhere. He depicts slowly decaying homesteads beneath fluffy white clouds hanging in dreamy blue skies.

Genuine frontier homes no longer exist today because so few wild landscapes are left. But when you stare at it for long enough, his daydream speaks to you. And in time I came to see that many abandoned homes still litter lonely countrysides today. There is something in the neglect, the half-broken walls, the yielding timbers, and the overgrown gardens that surround these structures, that is distinctly Wenning.

If Wenning represented humble beginnings perhaps it is because Wenning himself came from beginnings humbler than most. In Friesland during the 1880s, Wenning’s father made a modest living trading in art prints and materials. Even at a young age, Pieter Wenning’s art teacher encouraged his drawing and painting efforts, but his parents persuaded him to join the Dutch Railways. He married at age 25 but four years later lost his job following a strike against the company. Three years later he found work in a bookstore in Amsterdam, which transferred him to a franchise in Pretoria.

In 1908 Wenning bought a home in Sunnyside, and painted and studied art in his free time, supplementing his modest living with translation work at the Supreme Court. In 1909 he began to paint in oils. Although Wenning experimented with etchings, and held an exhibition, his efforts to sell his work (displayed in the windows of his bookshop) were not very fruitful.

In 1913 his company sent him to Cape Town, where he met DC Bonzaaier, who became a lifelong friend. After a second visit to Cape Town in 1915, Wenning returned to Pretoria, and began working in an art store after losing his job in the book store. In 1916 he revisited Cape Town, with three month’s leave to devote to painting. Sombre early works gave way progressively to spontaneous works bursting with colour and lyricism. But Wenning was still struggling to make ends meet, and his health suffered.

The self-critical Wenning, who often painted in the rain, almost destroyed all his work during one of these early visits to the Cape, but his friend Bonzaaier convinced him otherwise. The Cape Times, on 25 October 1916, described a Wenning painting as ‘a particularly beautiful picture of the Malay Quarter’. In the 1916/1917 winter issue of a magazine called The Studio, an auctioneer provided this insight, ‘the people of South Africa are beginning (to notice) a master of rare charm and ability’.

In 1917, Wenning based himself at the Vineyard Hotel in Newlands, Cape Town, while selling works depicting scenes along the East Coast of Africa as far as Lourenco Marques (Maputo). In the same year he was commissioned to paint the Vrouemonument (Women’s Memorial) in Bloemfontein. Wenning – despite bad weather, a worldwide flu pandemic, and serious health and financial issues of his own – continued to paint. Meanwhile, at last some of Wenning’s work began to sell in some of the first art auctions in South Africa.

By 1919 Wenning was described by Johannesburg’s Ernest Lizard – an art auctioneer – as ‘one of the great classical painters of South Africa’. It was the same year that his wife died and, after some months working in the Lowveld, he returned, seriously ill, to Cape Town. He did not paint again but left for Pretoria in 1921, and died there in the same year.

It is no surprise, looking at his art, and the vibrant longing of his simple subject matter, that his friends described him as a dreamer. His interest in philosophy and his rejection of formal religion meant even his funeral was a humble affair conducted by laymen.

In the same year that Wenning was finally laid to rest, Tinus de Jongh arrived at the Cape. Meanwhile Wenning’s legacy had already begun to grow. Exhibitions were held in 1925 and 1931 to commemorate and celebrate Wenning’s art. Twenty years later, as seems to happen with every noteworthy South African artist, fakes and forgeries entered the market.

It is strange that Wenning is not more famous than he is in this country because it turns out that Wenning started what we now call Cape Impressionism, and his influence was felt by generations of South African artists that followed. Why then is Wenning not a household name?

Perhaps his modest works – very few exceed 50 x 50cm – can explain why he is sometimes overlooked. But if a fair-sized oil painting by Tinus de Jongh fetches R35 000, the same scene, the same size, by a Pieter Wenning is worth around R350 000. Tragically, even when Wenning was desperate for funds to pay for a serious operation needed by his wife (who died a few days after her operation), the most his art fetched was R30 (£15). Recently his Apies River and Union Buildings sold for R 1 225 400.

The reason behind the tremendous value of Wenning’s artistic endowment to us, comes from, I believe, the great struggle that was his life. Wenning struggled more than most artists, and thus his dreams were more earnest than most, and he gave his art to us by paying a high personal price. He enjoyed none of the simplest things he dreamed of – a home of his own, a place for his family to live out their lives.

Was he too poor to have children? Or too ill? He seemed preoccupied by settings that would have seemed ordinary to anyone else. But for someone simply trying to make his way in the world, to pay his debts, to stay alive, it is no wonder the scenes spun around him were as vivid but untouchable as dreams.

Perhaps this is why his art, uniquely, is known for its ebullience of green. Groenplaas (Green Farm) is one example. His sensitive, but independent view of the country was more than just a description of it. It was a dream that lives in many, if not all South Africans to this day. A dream of a place in the country to call home.