13. Mediating Impressionism in South Africa

O’Neill​, Morna

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13. Mediating Impressionism in South Africa

Morna O’Neill

Globalizing Impressionism: Reception, Translation, and Transnationalism

A 1956 memorial exhibition of work by the South African...

Author

Morna O’Neill

PublisherYale University Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00198.017

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-20015

Chapter subject tags:Lane, Fitz Henry, 1804-1865Impressionism (Art)--South AfricaCaldecott, Harry Stratford, 1886-1929Art--Collectors and collecting--South Africa--19th centuryImpressionism (Art)--ExhibitionsLandscape painting, South African--19th centuryRoworth, EdwardSlade School of Fine Art

13. Mediating Impressionism in South Africa

Morna O’Neill

A 1956 memorial exhibition of work by the South African painter Harry Stratford “Strat” Caldecott (1886–1929) held in Cape Town described him as a painter who “brought Monet in his heart” from Paris to South Africa (fig. 1).1 John Paris, former director of the South African National Gallery, writing on the occasion of the 1956 Memorial Exhibition, quoted in Esmé Berman, Art and Artists of South Africa (Cape Town: A. A. Balkema, 1983), 81. Yet, like many of the artists who traveled to Paris from South Africa, Caldecott’s exposure to French impressionism was limited. In 1912 he attended the Académie Julian in preparation for entry into the École des beaux-arts. The groundbreaking exhibition Paris and South African Artists, 1850–1965, at the South African National Gallery in 1988, was the first to explore the influence of Paris—both as a site for artistic training and a symbol of artistic freedom and cosmopolitanism—in the development of South African art.2 This exhibition built upon scholarly interest, as suggested by Marion Isaacs, The South African Impressionist Painters: A Select Bibliography (Johannesburg: University of Witwatersrand Department of Bibliography, Librarianship, and Typography, 1973). However, this influence did not necessarily extend to impressionism. Instead, in many histories of South African art, the various styles of post-impressionism and expressionism have been understood as exerting a stronger pull on South African artists.3 See, for example, Esmé Berman, The Story of South African Painting (Cape Town: A. A. Balkema, 1975); and A. C. Bouman, Painters of South Africa (Cape Town: J. H. De Bussy, 1955), as well as studies of individual artists such as Marion Arnold, Irma Stern: A Feast for the Eye (Stellenbosch: Fernwood, 1995); and Muller Ballot, Maggie Laubser: A Window on Always Light (Stellenbosch: Sun, 2016) According to F. L. Alexander, in Art in South Africa: Painting, Sculpture, and Graphic Work since 1900, only Strat Caldecott “succeeded in adapting impressionist methods of painting to South African conditions.”4 F. L. Alexander, Art in South Africa: Painting, Sculpture, and Graphic Work since 1900 (Cape Town: A. A. Balkema, 1968), 18.

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Description: St. George's Street during the Visit of the Prince of Wales by Caldecott, Harry...

Fig. 1. Harry Stratford “Strat” Caldecott, St. George’s Street during the Visit of the Prince of Wales, 1925. Oil on canvas, 56 × 44 cm. South African National Gallery, Cape Town.

South African–born art historian Tamar Garb has recently noted that she was encouraged, as a university student in Cape Town in the 1970s, to think of Paris as a focus of “dreams and desires,” a vision made all the more potent by an awareness of “the pariah status of South Africa as an oppressive and undemocratic state.”5 Tamar Garb, “Centres and Peripheries: Rethinking Cape Town and Paris for AR,” in Interdisciplinary Encounters: Hidden and Visible Explorations of the World of Adrian Rifkin, ed. Dana Arnold (London: I. B. Tauris, 2015), 19. The colonial government of the early twentieth century pursued a policy of white minority rule and racial separation that would lead to the adoption of apartheid as an official state policy with the election of the National Party in 1948. The work of a painter such as Strat Caldecott was stuck in a feedback loop: to be celebrated in South Africa during the postwar period was to be shunned internationally.

Africa is conspicuously absent from a long list of “international impressionisms” in Norma Broude’s landmark publication, World Impressionism, one that includes Europe, North America, Australia, and East Asia. The exclusion of South African art from the book is less surprising given that Broude was writing in 1990, just as negotiations to end apartheid were beginning. The postcolonial, post-apartheid era has posed new challenges for art historians of South Africa. South African scholars and, with them, the institutions and museums they oversee have shifted their focus to redress the racist agenda that structured the discipline for decades. These interventions are powerful and necessary, addressing “the contestation of space, of values, of traditions” in the public sphere, as Khwezi Gule has noted.6 Khwezi Gule, “Contending Legacies: South African Modern and Contemporary Art Collections,” in 1910–2010: One Hundred Years of Collecting: The Johannesburg Art Gallery, ed. Jillian Carman (Johannesburg: Johannesburg Art Gallery, 2010), 119. At the same time, this reframing often excludes the work of white South African artists of the twentieth century, engendering what South African National Gallery curator Hayden Proud has termed “amnesia” about the artistic past.7 Hayden Proud, “The Advancement of Art”: The South African Society of Artists and Its Exhibitors, 1902–1950 (Cape Town: South African National Gallery Iziko Museums of Cape Town, 2002), 7. This forgetfulness is especially troubling because it relieves these paintings of the historical burdens that they bear: impressionism was the domain of white South African artists and patrons, mediated by white Europeans. By participating in impressionism as a global phenomenon, white South African artists could both celebrate and elide the specifically South African context of their work: the South African landscape. As painters in an impressionist style, they focused upon the play of light and color in local landscapes from Cape Town to the Highveld. Yet this style connected them to a broader artistic movement, also eliding the racist colonial agenda upon which their access to the landscape depended. It must be acknowledged that the particularly South African nexus of race and power that would lead to the apartheid state was the product of “profoundly modern and transnational networks of knowledge and discourse,” as Jeremy Foster has noted.8 Jeremy Foster, Washed with Sun: Landscape and the Making of White South Africa (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburg Press, 2008), 4. These same networks fomented ideas of what constituted modern art, including impressionism.

South African engagement with impressionism presents a complex case study in this regard, as impressionism in the settler colony was mediated by the European art world. What did it mean to be a “South African” artist in 1913? And what did it have to do with impressionism, in South Africa and elsewhere? This essay identifies two ways in which French impressionism informed local and imperial artistic identities in South Africa in the early twentieth century: first, through the selection and display of French impressionist paintings for the Johannesburg Art Gallery, which opened to the public in 1910; and second, through a consideration of the networks of art education that mediated impressionism through arts school in Europe, especially the Slade School of Fine Art in London. The first decades of the twentieth century witnessed the creation of “South Africanism,” a national and imperial identity formulated by white colonial elites in relation to “nostalgic pastoralist ideals about landscape and identity” borrowed from Edwardian Britain.9 Foster, Washed with Sun, 39. Landscape painting, often in an impressionist style, created a collective identity for South Africa untroubled by the recently contested history of the South African War.

IMPRESSIONISM AT THE JOHANNESBURG ART GALLERY

South African artists first saw French impressionism on African soil in 1910, with the opening of the Johannesburg Art Gallery. This collection was assembled by the Anglo-Irish art dealer Hugh Lane (1875–1915), who occupied a unique role in the Edwardian art world as an international founder of museums.10 See Morna O’Neill, Hugh Lane: The Art Market and the Art Museum, 1893–1915 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018). Lane’s cultural and institutional work for South Africa was enabled by plutocratic “Randlord” collectors, bankers and businessmen who had earned their wealth in diamond- and gold-mining ventures (the latter centered in Witwatersrand, or “the Rand”). The idea for the gallery came from one such Randlord: Lady Florence Phillips, a South African married to Lionel Phillips, a British banker with mining interests.11 Maryna Fraser, “Randlords (act. 1880s–1914),” in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), https://bit.ly/3hn6ODQ. He managed Eckstein and Company, the South African arm of the banking firm Wernher, Beit, and Company.12 Stefan Kanfer, The Last Empire: De Beers, Diamonds, and the World (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1993), 79. Throughout the 1890s and into the twentieth century, Lionel Phillips was a key participant in the fiercely partisan arena of South African politics. For her part, Florence Phillips spearheaded cultural activities to bolster the “closer union movement” and establish the cultural agenda of the new state—efforts that balanced the local with the imperial as they constructed South African identity.13 Jillian Carman, Uplifting the Colonial Philistine: Florence Phillips and the Making of the Johannesburg Art Gallery (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2006).

Lane and his sponsors viewed the gallery as an articulation of a cosmopolitan civic identity within the context of empire, and he gravitated to impressionism as a marketable form of modernism that would be legitimized historically. The global marketplace for art, however, changed the nature of that history. Local audiences contested Lane’s role as cultural interpreter, and residents struggled to imagine themselves in the community suggested by his gallery. While artists in South Africa were generally supportive of Lane’s efforts, their understanding of what constituted “impressionism” changed according to its context as they moved between South African and European cities.

Plans for the Johannesburg Art Gallery began as part of a broader effort to create a stable civil society in South Africa in the aftermath of the South African War, known popularly at the time as the Boer War or Second Boer War (1899–1902). Great Britain and its two South African colonies, Cape Colony and Colony of Natal, defeated the two states founded by Dutch settlers and their descendants: the South African Republic (often referred to as the Transvaal or the Republic of Transvaal) and the Orange Free State. The British secured control over the former Boer republics and were free to shape a new South African state.14 Shula Marks and Stanley Trapido, “Lord Milner and the South African State,” History Workshop Journal 8 (1979): 52–80.

Official British policy advanced what was known as the “closer union movement,” based on the affinity of the two principle white “races” of South Africa—British and Dutch.15 Saul Dubow, “Colonial Nationalism, the Milner Kindergarten, and the Rise of ‘South Africanism,’ 1902–1910,” History Workshop Journal 43 (1997): 53–85. Edward VII ratified a constitution for South Africa in 1909, as the two British colonies joined the defeated Boer republics as a “self-governing dominion” within the British Empire and a “sister state” of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand in 1910.16 Donal Lowry, The South African War Re-Appraised (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 3. Although dominion status was not clearly defined until the Balfour Declaration of 1926, a dominion was “somewhere between a colony and a state.” See James Crawford, The Creation of States in International Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 243. South Africa, therefore, according to historian Saul Dubow, went through a postwar “construction” on two levels: as “nation-state” and as “realm of the imagination.”17 Saul Dubow, “Imagining the New South Africa in the Era of Reconstruction,” in The Impact of the South African War, ed. David Omissi and Andrew S. Thompson (London: Palgrave, 2002), 77.

Johannesburg was a booming gold-mining town in the South African Republic, a Boer settlement founded in 1852 and annexed by the British during the South African War. After the war, the city became increasingly important to British colonial policy and business interests. Lane’s friend Edwin Lutyens designed the Johannesburg Art Gallery as part of a broader urban plan commemorating British involvement in South Africa, including the Rand Regiments Memorial, dedicated to British soldiers who died during the recent war. The gallery, then, would be an integral part of articulating a new South African identity, one with closer ties to Great Britain. The gallery was supposed to heal the wounds of war by drawing upon notions of a shared cultural heritage among the white populations of South Africa, while also envisioning a cosmopolitan audience for modern French painting. Yet Lane and his donors clashed over aesthetics and the educational role of the gallery, especially since the nature of that education took on a different meaning for the South African collectors and philanthropists who funded Lane’s efforts.

In a letter to Julius Wernher, a principal in Wernher, Beit, and Company, Lionel Phillips indicated that the gallery would play an important role in forming South African identity: “It is absolutely necessary to cultivate the people’s minds and teach them to regard this country as their home.”18 Lionel Phillips to Julius Wernher, May 30, 1910, Barlow Ltd. Archives, Howard Strange Library of African Studies, Central Johannesburg Library (HSLAS). Phillips suggested that Canada might be a useful model for South Africa to consider how institutions that “contribute to people’s enlightenment and contentment” might be used to foster “the spirit of nationality.”19 Phillips to Wernher, May 30, 1910. Phillips here emphasized the value of art in “enlightening” the white audience as well as the public relations value of such efforts. This goal aligned with the efforts of artists such as James Smith Morland (1846–1921), who arrived in Cape Town in 1888 after studying at the Liverpool Academy of Art.20 Hans Fransen, J. S. Morland, 1846–1921 (Cape Town: South African National Gallery, 1977), 7. He was instrumental in the establishment of the South African Society of Artists (SASA) and its mission to play a “civilizing” role in the life of the new nation.21 Proud, “Advancement of Art,” 9.

Lane’s reputation as a knowledgeable and public-minded collector of modern art made him an ideal candidate to assist in the formation of a collection for the Municipal Art Gallery in Johannesburg. He hoped the collection would foster the development of South African art by educating artists and the public in contemporary artistic trends. The modern art purchased for South Africa between 1909 and 1911 totaled 108 paintings and nine sculptures, including eight paintings identified as “French Impressionist School,” all purchased from the Parisian dealer Paul Durand-Ruel: Les régates d’Argenteuil, La jetée de Trouville, and Le port de Trouville by Eugène Boudin; Le printemps by Claude Monet (fig. 2); Bord de l’eau à Veneux by Alfred Sisley; La Forêt by Camille Pissarro; La fenêtre sur la rivière by Henri Le Sidaner; and Anémones by Albert André. Otto Beit, another principal in Wernher, Beit, and Company, agreed to fund these purchases, an indication that he too supported Lane’s aesthetic goals.22 See Caroline Durand-Ruel Godfroy, “Durand-Ruel’s Influence on the Impressionist Collections of European Museums,” in Impressionism: Paintings Collected by European Museums, ed. Ann Dumas and Michael E. Shapiro (Atlanta: High Museum of Art, 1999), 37–39. On the impressionist works in the gallery, see Marco Goldin and Rochelle Keene, eds., Da Corot a Monet: Opere impressioniste e post impressioniste dalla Johannesburg Art Gallery (Conegliano: Linea d’ombra Libri, 2003).

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Description: Le printemps by Monet, Claude

Fig. 2. Claude Monet, Le printemps, 1875. Oil on canvas, 58 × 73 cm. Johannesburg Art Gallery.

These selections represent Lane’s belief in the educational value of modern art in aesthetic terms. Lane himself described his goals for the South African collection as “to get a fair example of the best work of the men who have had dynamic influence on their colleagues and their period; and to connect them into groups for the purpose of comparative study by all real serious art lovers and enthusiasts.”23 Interview with Lane in the Transvaal Leader, quoted in Carman, Uplifting the Colonial Philistine, 169. The collection would provide the city with a unique artistic profile: the Johannesburg Art Gallery would be the first municipal public collection of modern art outside of the British Isles.24 P. G. Konody, “Millionaires’ Gift to South Africa: An Art Gallery for Johannesburg,” Daily Mail, June 12, 1910(?), Press Clipping Album, HSLAS. As such, it would connect the South African city with recent developments in British and French art. Critics celebrated the collection as a veritable “temple of art” in distant Johannesburg.25 These quotations all comes from press clippings in the scrapbook devoted to the Johannesburg Art Gallery, HSLAS. Roger Fry, for example, praised the aesthetic coherence of Lane’s selection for Johannesburg as superior to “anything that we have in England.”26 Roger Fry, “Reviews and Notices: Catalogue of the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Johannesburg,” Burlington Magazine 19, no. 99 (1911): 178.

The notion that modern art was the best choice for South Africa was not universally shared by the donors who financially supported Lane’s work. Other collectors doubted the appropriateness of some modern art for the colony, criticizing Lane’s selection of works by artists as diverse as Henri-Joseph Harpignies and John Everett Millais.27As discussed in O’Neill, Hugh Lane, 115–39. Lane openly commented that some donors suggested to him that “only popular pictures would be appreciated here [Johannesburg], and that I would find very little interest evinced in the more original and individual works.”28 Hugh Lane, quoted in G. C. Ross, Municipal Gallery of Modern Art (Johannesburg, 1910), ii. As Julius Wernher complained to Lionel Phillips, Lane “like[d] pictures best that do not reveal their beauty at a glance,” and this habit of viewing, and purchasing, proved to be a problem.29 Julius Werner to Lionel Phillips, July 2, 1910, quoted in Michael Stevenson, Art and Aspirations: The Randlords of South Africa and Their Collections (Vlaeberg: Fernwood, 2002), 87. The donor here alluded to the educational goals of the gallery: if art could be called upon to act as a teacher, then it needed to be direct and effective in its mode of communication.

Lane countered Wernher’s critique by combining instrumentality and aesthetics. When Lane spoke at the opening of the gallery, he quoted the socialist playwright George Bernard Shaw, noting that “it is the duty of the rich to provide luxuries to the poor; the necessaries of life, they are likely to fight for themselves.”30 Hugh Lane, “Prefatory Note,” in Ross, Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, xvi–xix. The gallery, then, was a philanthropic project, and the art dealer played a crucial role in enabling these efforts: he was the conduit for “luxury” in the lives of all, rich or poor. When the pictures first went on public display in Johannesburg, one reviewer suggested that Lane did not seem overly concerned with didactic subject matter but instead wanted “a really representative collection of modern paintings.”31 “Pictures for Johannesburg, A Permanent Gallery,” African World, September 17, 1910, 305, press clipping, Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG). In contrast, the Phillipses and their associates viewed the gallery in educational terms: it would provide “intelligent recreation” and “act as a teacher,” according to a report in the journal South Africa.32 Stevenson, Art and Aspirations, 79. The modern British art and impressionist paintings would provide a model for artistic practice that would encourage new, uniquely South African forms of artistic expression.

South Africa’s landscapes seemed ideally suited to the looser, plein-air approach of impressionism. The British–South African artist George Smithard (1873–1919) aligned himself with Lane and praised the gallery in aesthetic terms. He insisted that works of art should, first and foremost, address the eye rather than the mind through the choice of subject matter. He likewise advocated a formalist approach to the paintings, stating that their chief educational benefit would be the instruction of the eye for young artists and the art-viewing public.33 G. S. Smithard, “The Art Gallery, An Artist’s Critique, Education and Some Theories,” Star, November 26, 1910, press clipping album, HSLAS. Trained at the Slade School in London, the Académie Julian in Paris, and the Hoger Instituut voor Schone Kunsten in Antwerp, Smithard galvanized a generation of artists in a new approach to landscape painting focused on pastoral views of the Cape landscape rendered in a light, bright palette with loose brushstrokes. Aesthetic formalism, then, could inspire a national school of painting.

Only eight of the paintings in Lane’s original selection were considered “impressionist,” and it was not until 1937, with the appointment of Anton Hendriks as director, that the gallery adopted a more active acquisitions policy to fill gaps in the French art collection.34 Jillian Carman and Sheree Lissoos, “Becoming Historic,” in Carman, 1910–2010: One Hundred Years of Collecting, 45. See also Jillian Carman, “Johannesburg Art Gallery and the Urban Future,” in Emerging Johannesburg: Perspectives on the Postapartheid City, ed. Richard Tomlinson, Robert A. Beauregard, Lindsay Bremner, and Xolela Mangcu (New York: Routledge, 2003), 231–56. Even with this limited representation of French impressionism on the gallery’s walls, at least one South African artist responded almost immediately to the Johannesburg Art Gallery’s Monet: the political cartoonist D. C. Boonzaier (1865–1950) wrote in his diary on April 6, 1915, that he saw Monet’s Le printemps at the Johannesburg Art Gallery and considered it “a supreme work” (see fig. 2)35 D. C. Boonzaier diaries, April 6, 1915, South African Library, Cape Town. My thanks to Jillian Carman for drawing my attention to this source. Although this encounter had no direct bearing on Boonzaier’s sharp political caricatures, impressionist painting did exert a profound influence on his son Gregoire Boonzaier (1909–2005). After studying at Heatherley School of Fine Art and the Central School of Art and Design in London in the early 1930s, he returned to Cape Town and developed a style known as “Cape Impressionism,” a synthesis of impressionist and post-impressionist styles.36 Esmé Berman, “The New Group,” in The Story of South African Painting (Cape Town: A. A. Balkema, 1975), https://bit.ly/3fNzcP7. His paintings of Cape Town often focused on the ethnically diverse neighborhoods of Bo-Kaap (formerly known as the “Malay Quarter”) and District Six. For instance, District Six with View to Harbor (1953) suffuses the city with light and color (fig. 3).

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Description: District Six with View to Harbor by Boonzaier, Gregoire

Fig. 3. Gregoire Boonzaier, District Six with View to Harbor, 1953. Oil on canvas, 27 × 56 cm. Signed and dated bottom left. Private collection. Sold—2014 by Johans Borman Fine Art.

Moses Tladi (1903–1959), a black South African artist who was the first black artist to have his paintings shown at the South African National Gallery, in exhibitions in 1930 and 1931, also noted the influence that the French impressionist paintings in the Johannesburg Art Gallery had on the development of his art.37 Elza Miles, Land and Lives: The Story of Early Black Artists (Cape Town: Human and Rousseau for the Johannesburg Art Gallery, 1997), 15. Tladi was serving as a gardener for a British family in Johannesburg when he used leftover house paint and a stick to explore his interest in painting. Howard Pim, a well-connected accountant and connoisseur who supported Tladi’s artistic efforts, arranged for the young artist to visit the Johannesburg Art Gallery in 1928, where as a “native” he would not usually have been allowed. According to Pim, Tladi spent most of his time in the French room and declared his admiration for Monet. By the mid-1930s, Tladi introduced brighter, almost pastel colors and looser brushstrokes (fig. 4).

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Description: Winter—Trees, Driefontein by Tladi, Moses

Fig. 4. Moses Tladi, Winter—Trees, Driefontein, c. 1935–40. Oil on board, 25 × 26 cm. Private collection.

A recent exhibition at the South African National Gallery in 2016 brought together Tladi’s work for the first time since the 1930s, but the full art-historical context of his paintings still needs to be explored. Tladi encountered French impressionism at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, but many white South African artists were already familiar with the latest developments in European art through travel to London, Paris, Munich, Antwerp, and elsewhere. Furthermore, Tladi could not escape the label of “native artist,” one whose primitivism was perceived as an artistic weakness at the very moment when artists such as Irma Stern (1894–1966), who had studied at the Weimar Academy, were introducing European primitivism to South African audiences.38 Marion Arnold, Irma Stern: A Feast for the Eye (Nova Scotia: Fernwood, 1995). Personal and political forces brought an end to Tladi’s public career as an artist. He was forcibly removed from his home in an area designated “for whites only” by the government in 1956.39 Moses Tladi has been rediscovered in the early twenty-first century, largely through the efforts of Angela Read Lloyd, the granddaughter of Tladi’s employer, Herbert Read. Angela Read Lloyd, The Artist in the Garden: The Quest for Moses Tladi (Johannesburg: Print Matters, 2009). To display Tladi’s art alongside Monet and Pissarro at the Johannesburg Art Gallery would enrich the intertwined histories of French impressionism and South African art. More importantly, to show his paintings alongside those by white South Africa artists discussed below, such as Edward Roworth and Hugo Naudé, among others, would foreground the way in which South African artists mediated race, nation, and empire through impressionism in the early twentieth century.40 The “Revisions” project, organized by the private Campbell Smith Collection, makes an important intervention in this regard. The website Revisions: Expanding the Narrative of South African Art, http://www.revisions.co.za, and the online database of the collection, which focuses on presenting black artists of the twentieth century, aim to “inspire established art historians to take up the challenge of rewriting South Africa’s art history with the complexity and nuance it deserves.” Art education and British imperial identity determined the South African encounter with impressionism, especially in relation to landscape painting.

ARTISTIC NETWORKS AND SOUTH AFRICAN IMPRESSIONISM

According to the Magazine of Art, it was commonplace by the early 1890s to “sneer at the philistinism of colonials” whose access to the latest artistic trends was often limited to coverage in the illustrated press.41 “Art Prospects in South Africa,” Magazine of Art, January 1894, 41. Yet even before the opening of the Johannesburg Art Gallery, knowledge of impressionism had traveled to South Africa through the Académie Julian in Paris or the Slade School of Fine Art in London, as a number of prominent South African artists passed through these schools in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.42 For the Slade School, see Emma Chambers, “The Cultivation of Mind and Hand: Teaching Art at the Slade School 1868–92,” in Governing Cultures: Art Institutions in Victorian London, ed. Paul Barlow and Colin Trodd (London: Routledge, 2000), 98–113; and Emma Chambers, “Slade School Influences on the Camden Town Group 1896–1910,” in The Camden Town Group in Context, ed. Helena Bonett, Ysanne Holt, and Jennifer Mundy (London: Tate Research Publication, 2012), https://bit.ly/32BQuuZ. Impressionism became “a catchword,” according to Anna Gruetzner Robins, “for any painting with a loosely worked technique, a plein-air element, or an interest in modern life.” Anna Gruetzner Robins, “British Impressionism: The Magic and Poetry of Life around Them,” in World Impressionism: The International Movement, 1860–1920, ed. Norma Broude (New York: Abrams, 1990), 71.

Robert Gwelo Goodman became the first South African artist to study in Paris, attending the Académie Julian in 1895, where he studied under William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825–1905) and Gabriel Ferrier (1847–1914). Upon his return to South Africa in 1915, Goodman focused on landscape painting with great success. The Phillipses presented his landscape Konakontes, South West Africa (n.d.), to the Johannesburg Art Gallery in 1916 (fig. 5). The first South African painting to enter the collection, it shows a small oasis amid the desert mountains that surround the Swakop River in present-day Namibia. In quick, short strokes, Goodman conveys the only hint of habitation in the dark-green oasis: a herd of grazing cattle appears as dashes of white, echoing the scumble of white that creates depth in the cliffs above. For South African commentators at the time, Goodman’s choice of subject and his style made him a distinctly South African artist. His mentor, Morland, realizing the value of his home country to Goodman’s success, advised the artist to change his name to something more “South African.” The town of Gwelo, situated between Durban and East London on the Eastern Cape, was established in 1895. From 1901 onward Goodman signed his name “R. Gwelo Goodman.”43 Joyce Newton Thompson, Gwelo Goodman: South African Artist (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1951), 9.

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Description: Konakontes, South West Africa by Goodman, Robert Gwelo

Fig. 5. Robert Gwelo Goodman, Konakontes, South West Africa, n.d. (before 1916). Oil on canvas, dimensions unknown. Johannesburg Art Gallery.

A painting such as Konakontes speaks many artistic languages. This new style seems to be a mélange of late nineteenth-century approaches to art, or what one art historian has described as English impressionism mixed with the academic tradition and aspects of French impressionism and, at times, post-impressionism.44 As noted by Brendan Bell, Clément Sénèque: Life and Work, Including a Catalogue Raisonné, (MA thesis, University of Natal, 1988), 35. John X. Merriman, the English-born South African politician and statesman, declared that Goodman painted “South Africa for South Africans.”45 John X. Merriman, The Natal Mercury, January 17, 1913, 7, as quoted in Foster, Washed with Sun, 54. The artist created something unique for South African viewers: “to teach us what beauty there is in our vast spaces of desert, in our barren hills, in our glorious sunshine, and above all, in those infinitely pellucid skies which the daily recurring wonder of dawn and sunset bring to refresh our souls.”46 Catalogue of Pictures by R. Gwelo Goodman (Johannesburg, 1916), as quoted in Melanie Hillebrand, “Art and Architecture in Natal, 1910–1940” (PhD diss., University of Natal, 1986), 91. The landscape and the light in South Africa was thought to present a particular challenge to metropolitan artistic techniques. Jeremy Foster has explored the central role of the land in the idea of South Africa as a nation, an ideologically expedient way to unite the various white communities without recourse to history or ethnicity.47 Foster, Washed with Sun. This idea also underpins J. M. Coetzee’s reflections on South African literature in J. M. Coetzee, White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988). As a result, artists such as Goodman had to forge a new style, one that seemed ideally suited to the peculiarities of the South African experience. Most South African artists ignored the industrial realities of extraction capitalism. When mines do appear in landscape paintings, as in Goodman’s Mines and Dam (1917), they are treated as a natural, and therefore inevitable, part of the landscape.48 Dirk Klopper, “An Unsettled Habitation: Narratives of South African Landscape,” in The Lie of the Land: Representations of the South African Landscape, ed. Michael Godby (Cape Town: South African National Gallery, 2010), 39–45.

South African landscape painting in the early twentieth century often imagined the land as uninhabited and unsettled, even as the government increased efforts to wrest land rights from the black population, including through legislation such as the Natives Land Act of 1913. This law introduced territorial segregation to the Union of South Africa by creating land reserves for black South Africans, and black people could live outside of these reserves only for reasons of employment.49 As discussed in Cherryl Walker, “Looking Forward, Looking Back: Beyond the Narrative of Loss and Restoration in the History of Land,” in Godby, Lie of the Land. These policies would only become more restrictive with time, and they would also extend to the South Asian and “colored” population in the 1930s. Further legislation would mandate the segregation of “colored” and Indian populations. See William Beinart and Peter Delius, “The Historical Context and Legacy of the Natives Land Act of 1913,” Journal of South African Studies 40, no. 4 (2014): 667–88. The Winter Exhibition of the South African Society of Artists in Cape Town in 1909 noted the importance of landscape as a genre in South Africa, since history, and thus history painting, remained “a sphere of controversy.”50 As quoted in Foster, Washed with Sun, 53. The artist Edward Roworth would have been keenly aware of these controversies as he came to South Africa from Lancashire to fight in the South African War, returning to England only for artistic training, first with Hubert von Herkomer and then at the Slade.51 Roworth enrolled twice in the Slade School, first in 1911 and then again in 1914, according to an e-mail exchange with Robert Winckworth, Senior Library Assistant, University College London Special Collections, Archives, and Records, September 3, 2018. Yet Table Mountain, Cape Town, South Africa (n.d.), sublimates the complex history of British and Dutch interaction in the Cape Colony to the study of color and form (fig. 6). Still, Roworth could not entirely erase the past from the landscape. The colorful dots in the left foreground are brown-skinned figures moving through the landscape, toward a squat building that bears the unmistakable outline of a thatched-roof cottage, a technique brought to South Africa by Dutch settlers and German missionaries. To one angry South African art critic writing in 1906, Roworth’s debt to impressionism was a liability, as this mode of painting rendered indistinct both the staffage of landscape painting and the classification of race and ethnicity that underpinned the ordering of South African society: “The Impressionist opposition is making little or no headway, and Mr. Roworth and Mr. Smithard have been able to convince few if any that a dab of sepia paint is really a patient Malay gathering firewood.”52 “In Camera,” South Africa News, November 30, 1906, news clipping, South African National Gallery archive, as quoted in Proud, “Advancement of Art,” 11. The presence of a nonwhite population in Table Mountain, Cape Town, South Africa, is rendered as artistic form, and the colonial cottage is integrated into the landscape.

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Description: Table Mountain, Cape Town, South Africa by Roworth, Edward

Fig. 6. Edward Roworth, Table Mountain, Cape Town, South Africa, n.d. (before 1932?). Oil on cardboard, 59.5 × 75 cm. National Trust, Shaw’s Corner, United Kingdom.

Although Roworth would later dismiss impressionism, he caused controversy within the South African Society of Art in 1906 for his adherence, along with Smithard, to impressionist principles, which he would further explore during his studies at the Slade.53 Proud, “Advancement of Art,” 11. Important teachers there included Frederick Brown, a member of the New English Art Club, as well as Philip Wilson Steer, Ambrose McEvoy, and Henry Tonks, who incorporated impressionist techniques into the curriculum.54 Robins, “British Impressionism,” 84–85. Roworth combined this impressionistic approach to landscape with a pastoralism rooted in English ideas about the landscape and the ideal relation between city and country then influencing urban planning in Cape Town. Commentators and publications such as Country Life in South Africa (established 1915) promoted the Garden City ideal of bringing the country into the city.55 Nicholas Coetzer, Building Apartheid: On Architecture and Order in Imperial Cape Town (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2013). The links between the pastoral tradition of landscape painting and imperial urban planning were part of a longer history of colonial endeavors to construct South African identity as a manifestation of British diaspora.56 Alan Lester, Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth-Century South Africa and Britain (London: Routledge, 2001), 189.

Roworth affirmed the connections between art and imperial identity in his role as art critic and curator, especially in the essay “Landscape Art in South Africa,” written in 1917 for a special issue of the Studio addressing “The Art of the British Empire Overseas.” Charles Holme, the editor of the Studio, had invited reflections on landscape painting from prominent artists in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, furthering the identification of national schools of landscape painting within an imperial context. This emphasis on landscape was not unique to South Africa and was thought to be a defining feature of “Dominion” art, as Christine Boyanski has demonstrated.57 Edward Roworth, “Landscape Art in South Africa,” in Art of the British Empire Overseas, ed. Charles Holme (London: “The Studio,” 1917), 115–42. Christine Boyanski, “Selective Memory: The British Empire Exhibition and National Histories of Art,” in Rethinking Settler Colonialism: History and Memory in Australia, Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand, and South Africa, ed. Annie E. Coombes (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 156–70.

Roworth acknowledged the specific problem of creating a South African art from a landscape characterized by its “vast monotony” and “vast distance,” features that are “almost impossible” to convey on canvas. Yet for him this challenge was mitigated by South African light, which seemed to invite impressionist approaches and even reached back to the supposed origins of South African impressionism in British art: “It would need a second Turner to fix eternally these noble and evanescent tints.”58 Roworth, “Landscape Art in South Africa,” 116. As in other aspects of colonial life, including business and administration, the paradigms were metropolitan.

For Roworth, South Africa had only “one absolutely national landscape painter”: Hugo Naudé (1869–1941), an artist from an Afrikaner family of Dutch heritage.59 Roworth, “Landscape Art,” 117. Naudé studied in Europe for seven years, from 1889 to 1896, first at the Slade School in 1889 under Alphonse Legros and then at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich under Franz von Lenbach. Early reviews praised his paintings in terms that resonate with impressionism, emphasizing, for example, the artist’s fascination with light: “every thing [sic] he touches exudes sunshine.”60 Press clipping dated November 16, 1904, from the SANG archive, as quoted in Proud, “Advancement of Art,” 39. Naudé established himself as a professional artist by promoting his local identity and connection to the landscape: the Cape Argus Weekly captioned his portrait “A South African born, and a born Artist.”61 “Portraits of Famous South African Artists, Part II,” Cape Argus Weekly, December 26, 1906, II.

Many of Naudé’s paintings focus on the mountainous scenery of the Western Cape, the landscape that surrounded his studio in the town of Worcester. At times, his paintings of the rocky cliffs at Hermanus along Walker Bay recall Monet’s view of Cap d’Antibes and implicitly endorsed the view of mining magnate Cecil Rhodes, who imagined South Africa as a new Mediterranean in the decade before the South African War. But Naudé made a name for himself as a painter of the veld, the expanse of grassland that came to characterize the South African landscape. In particular, he focused on the arid landscape of Namaqualand in the Northern Cape, notable for its botanical diversity and its flowering fields in springtime. A canvas such as Namaqualand Daisies depicts the bright-orange daisies as flecks of unblended yellow and red, nestled between the green of the mountains and the cool blues of the other wildflowers (fig. 7). The artist’s strokes are broad and fluid, with thick impasto in the foreground and among the daisies. Naudé would return again and again to the flowering fields of Namaqualand, depicting this tourist destination as a vast expanse and a feast of color for the eyes. While Naudé focused on the flowering veld, other artists of Dutch and Afrikaner heritage were turning to the local topography of the mountainous Highveld in Southern Transvaal, anticipating the “cult of the veld” that would overtake South African art in the 1930s, as exemplified by the stark, geometric landscapes of Jacobus Pierneef.62 As discussed in Anna Tietze, A History of the Iziko South African National Gallery: Reflections on Art and National Identity (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2017), 64–65. By that time, the empty expanse of the veld was synonymous with the idea of white nationhood that would fuel the creation of the apartheid state after World War II.63 Foster, Washed with Sun, 69.

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Description: Namaqualand Daisies by Naudé, Hugo

Fig. 7. Hugo Naudé, Namaqualand Daisies, n.d. Oil on canvas, dimensions unknown. Private collection, Cape Town.

What does the belated nature of South African impressionism suggest about colonial temporality? Although artists of an earlier generation such as Strat Caldecott and George Smithard were part of a transnational artistic network, it was one characterized by incremental influence, what Evelyn Cohen has described as “the slow infiltration to a colonial country of the mainstream continental styles of painting developed by a preceding generation.”64 Evelyn Cohen, “Early Training and French Vision in South African Art Prior to 1920,” in Paris and South African Artists, 1850–1965, ed. Lucy Alexander, Emma Bedford, and Evelyn Cohen (Cape Town: South African National Gallery, 1988), 12. This imperial delay explains why the South African movement most readily identified with impressionism did not develop until the 1930s with “Cape Impressionism,” but it overlooks the circulation of artists in metropolitan networks of artistic training in the preceding decades. “Cape Impressionism” seems to be a particularly South African example of what Homi Bhabha has called the “time-lagged colonial moment.”65 Homi K. Bhabha, “Race, Time and the Revision of Modernity,” in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (London: Routledge 2006), 219. Yet Bhabha considers the ways in which modernism and modernity were formulated in relation to a non-Western, non-modern colonial world. The status of South Africa as a settler colony complicates this temporality, not least due to what has been called South Africa’s “colonialism of a special type,” in which white South Africa created an “internal colony” of non-white South Africa.66 For an opinionated overview of “colonialism of a special type,” see Nicholas Visser, “Postcoloniality of a Special Type: Theory and Its Appropriations in South Africa,” Yearbook of English Studies 27 (1997): 79–94. J. M. Coetzee uses the phrase “internal colony” to describe South Africa after the victory of the National Party in the elections of 1948. See J. M. Coetzee, White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 11. This “special type” of colonialism complicates the origin of South African postcoloniality. Did it begin with the creation of the Union of South Africa in 1910, the National Party victory in the elections of 1948, of the creation of a post-apartheid state in 1994? As Bhabha himself noted, South Africa provides “the opportunity to actually see transformative elements at work in the construction of a new historic identity, where the question of race and cultural different is foregrounded.”67 David Atwell, “Interview with Homi Bhabha,” Current Writing 5, no. 2 (October 1993): 100–113, as quoted on 112. The paintings discussed here, executed by artists trained in London and Paris, are not exercises in subaltern mimicry. Instead, they relied upon transnational networks created by imperial modernity for style and subject matter. In this instance, the “periphery” of South Africa was more or less contemporaneous with the “center.”

The notion that South African artists were influenced by the Slade School rather than French impressionism points to the important role that the “British overseas” identity played in South African culture in the first decades of the twentieth century. The South African historian Saul Dubow has proposed a new understanding of “Britishness” as a global ideal in the early twentieth century, one that dispenses with claims of ancestry or even territory to situate it as a “field of cultural, political, and symbolic attachments which includes the rights, claims, and aspirations of subject-citizens as well as citizen-subjects.”68 Saul Dubow, “How British Was the British World? The Case of South Africa,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 37 (March 2007): 3. London became the site of impressionism for anglophile and anglophone South African artists such as Edward Roworth and Robert Gwelo Goodman. Both impressionism and the artists who practiced it became imperial migrants, blending British and South African culture and society, reconfiguring it, and transmitting it back to London through exhibitions and publications.69 This process of imperial migration is outlined in Kent Fedorowich and Andrew S. Thompson, “Mapping the Contours of the British World: Empire, Migration, and Identity,” in Empire, Migration, and Identity in the British World, ed. Kent Fedorowich, Andrew S. Thompson, and Keith Povey (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 1–41.

The focus on landscape painting and metropolitan modern art for a white audience provides a counter-history to the primitivism that was shaping advanced modern art in continental Europe at this very moment. Hugh Lane was exporting French impressionist art to Johannesburg while artists such as Pablo Picasso in Paris were appropriating the art of African cultures to reinvigorate painting and possibly critique European colonialism.70 Patricia Leighten, “The White Peril and L’Art négre: Picasso, Primitivism, and Anticolonialism,” Art Bulletin 72, no. 4 (December 1990): 609–30. For a discussion of this dynamic in relation to the art produced in settler colonies of the British Empire, see Nicholas Thomas, Possessions: Indigenous Art/Colonial Culture (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999). Lane was not interested in expanding his view of modern art beyond the French impressionists, even as Roger Fry’s exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists at the Grafton Galleries was making headlines in London in late 1910. In South Africa, modern art did not explore the primitive art then being appropriated from Africa; instead, impressionism and other modern art performed the crucial work of nation-building.

1 John Paris, former director of the South African National Gallery, writing on the occasion of the 1956 Memorial Exhibition, quoted in Esmé Berman, Art and Artists of South Africa (Cape Town: A. A. Balkema, 1983), 81. »

2 This exhibition built upon scholarly interest, as suggested by Marion Isaacs, The South African Impressionist Painters: A Select Bibliography (Johannesburg: University of Witwatersrand Department of Bibliography, Librarianship, and Typography, 1973). »

3 See, for example, Esmé Berman, The Story of South African Painting (Cape Town: A. A. Balkema, 1975); and A. C. Bouman, Painters of South Africa (Cape Town: J. H. De Bussy, 1955), as well as studies of individual artists such as Marion Arnold, Irma Stern: A Feast for the Eye (Stellenbosch: Fernwood, 1995); and Muller Ballot, Maggie Laubser: A Window on Always Light (Stellenbosch: Sun, 2016) »

4 F. L. Alexander, Art in South Africa: Painting, Sculpture, and Graphic Work since 1900 (Cape Town: A. A. Balkema, 1968), 18. »

5 Tamar Garb, “Centres and Peripheries: Rethinking Cape Town and Paris for AR,” in Interdisciplinary Encounters: Hidden and Visible Explorations of the World of Adrian Rifkin, ed. Dana Arnold (London: I. B. Tauris, 2015), 19. »

6 Khwezi Gule, “Contending Legacies: South African Modern and Contemporary Art Collections,” in 1910–2010: One Hundred Years of Collecting: The Johannesburg Art Gallery, ed. Jillian Carman (Johannesburg: Johannesburg Art Gallery, 2010), 119. »

7 Hayden Proud, “The Advancement of Art”: The South African Society of Artists and Its Exhibitors, 1902–1950 (Cape Town: South African National Gallery Iziko Museums of Cape Town, 2002), 7. »

8 Jeremy Foster, Washed with Sun: Landscape and the Making of White South Africa (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburg Press, 2008), 4. »

9 Foster, Washed with Sun, 39. »

10 See Morna O’Neill, Hugh Lane: The Art Market and the Art Museum, 1893–1915 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018). »

11 Maryna Fraser, “Randlords (act. 1880s–1914),” in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), https://bit.ly/3hn6ODQ. »

12 Stefan Kanfer, The Last Empire: De Beers, Diamonds, and the World (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1993), 79. »

13 Jillian Carman, Uplifting the Colonial Philistine: Florence Phillips and the Making of the Johannesburg Art Gallery (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2006). »

14 Shula Marks and Stanley Trapido, “Lord Milner and the South African State,” History Workshop Journal 8 (1979): 52–80. »

15 Saul Dubow, “Colonial Nationalism, the Milner Kindergarten, and the Rise of ‘South Africanism,’ 1902–1910,” History Workshop Journal 43 (1997): 53–85. »

16 Donal Lowry, The South African War Re-Appraised (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 3. Although dominion status was not clearly defined until the Balfour Declaration of 1926, a dominion was “somewhere between a colony and a state.” See James Crawford, The Creation of States in International Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 243. »

17 Saul Dubow, “Imagining the New South Africa in the Era of Reconstruction,” in The Impact of the South African War, ed. David Omissi and Andrew S. Thompson (London: Palgrave, 2002), 77. »

18 Lionel Phillips to Julius Wernher, May 30, 1910, Barlow Ltd. Archives, Howard Strange Library of African Studies, Central Johannesburg Library (HSLAS). »

19 Phillips to Wernher, May 30, 1910. »

20 Hans Fransen, J. S. Morland, 1846–1921 (Cape Town: South African National Gallery, 1977), 7. »

21 Proud, “Advancement of Art,” 9. »

22 See Caroline Durand-Ruel Godfroy, “Durand-Ruel’s Influence on the Impressionist Collections of European Museums,” in Impressionism: Paintings Collected by European Museums, ed. Ann Dumas and Michael E. Shapiro (Atlanta: High Museum of Art, 1999), 37–39. On the impressionist works in the gallery, see Marco Goldin and Rochelle Keene, eds., Da Corot a Monet: Opere impressioniste e post impressioniste dalla Johannesburg Art Gallery (Conegliano: Linea d’ombra Libri, 2003). »

23 Interview with Lane in the Transvaal Leader, quoted in Carman, Uplifting the Colonial Philistine, 169. »

24 P. G. Konody, “Millionaires’ Gift to South Africa: An Art Gallery for Johannesburg,” Daily Mail, June 12, 1910(?), Press Clipping Album, HSLAS. »

25 These quotations all comes from press clippings in the scrapbook devoted to the Johannesburg Art Gallery, HSLAS. »

26 Roger Fry, “Reviews and Notices: Catalogue of the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Johannesburg,” Burlington Magazine 19, no. 99 (1911): 178. »

27 As discussed in O’Neill, Hugh Lane, 115–39. »

28 Hugh Lane, quoted in G. C. Ross, Municipal Gallery of Modern Art (Johannesburg, 1910), ii. »

29 Julius Werner to Lionel Phillips, July 2, 1910, quoted in Michael Stevenson, Art and Aspirations: The Randlords of South Africa and Their Collections (Vlaeberg: Fernwood, 2002), 87. »

30 Hugh Lane, “Prefatory Note,” in Ross, Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, xvi–xix. »

31 “Pictures for Johannesburg, A Permanent Gallery,” African World, September 17, 1910, 305, press clipping, Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG). »

32 Stevenson, Art and Aspirations, 79. »

33 G. S. Smithard, “The Art Gallery, An Artist’s Critique, Education and Some Theories,” Star, November 26, 1910, press clipping album, HSLAS. »

34 Jillian Carman and Sheree Lissoos, “Becoming Historic,” in Carman, 1910–2010: One Hundred Years of Collecting, 45. See also Jillian Carman, “Johannesburg Art Gallery and the Urban Future,” in Emerging Johannesburg: Perspectives on the Postapartheid City, ed. Richard Tomlinson, Robert A. Beauregard, Lindsay Bremner, and Xolela Mangcu (New York: Routledge, 2003), 231–56. »

35 D. C. Boonzaier diaries, April 6, 1915, South African Library, Cape Town. My thanks to Jillian Carman for drawing my attention to this source. »

36 Esmé Berman, “The New Group,” in The Story of South African Painting (Cape Town: A. A. Balkema, 1975), https://bit.ly/3fNzcP7. »

37 Elza Miles, Land and Lives: The Story of Early Black Artists (Cape Town: Human and Rousseau for the Johannesburg Art Gallery, 1997), 15. »

38 Marion Arnold, Irma Stern: A Feast for the Eye (Nova Scotia: Fernwood, 1995). »

39 Moses Tladi has been rediscovered in the early twenty-first century, largely through the efforts of Angela Read Lloyd, the granddaughter of Tladi’s employer, Herbert Read. Angela Read Lloyd, The Artist in the Garden: The Quest for Moses Tladi (Johannesburg: Print Matters, 2009). »

40 The “Revisions” project, organized by the private Campbell Smith Collection, makes an important intervention in this regard. The website Revisions: Expanding the Narrative of South African Art, http://www.revisions.co.za, and the online database of the collection, which focuses on presenting black artists of the twentieth century, aim to “inspire established art historians to take up the challenge of rewriting South Africa’s art history with the complexity and nuance it deserves.” »

41 “Art Prospects in South Africa,” Magazine of Art, January 1894, 41. »

42 For the Slade School, see Emma Chambers, “The Cultivation of Mind and Hand: Teaching Art at the Slade School 1868–92,” in Governing Cultures: Art Institutions in Victorian London, ed. Paul Barlow and Colin Trodd (London: Routledge, 2000), 98–113; and Emma Chambers, “Slade School Influences on the Camden Town Group 1896–1910,” in The Camden Town Group in Context, ed. Helena Bonett, Ysanne Holt, and Jennifer Mundy (London: Tate Research Publication, 2012), https://bit.ly/32BQuuZ. Impressionism became “a catchword,” according to Anna Gruetzner Robins, “for any painting with a loosely worked technique, a plein-air element, or an interest in modern life.” Anna Gruetzner Robins, “British Impressionism: The Magic and Poetry of Life around Them,” in World Impressionism: The International Movement, 1860–1920, ed. Norma Broude (New York: Abrams, 1990), 71. »

43 Joyce Newton Thompson, Gwelo Goodman: South African Artist (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1951), 9. »

44 As noted by Brendan Bell, Clément Sénèque: Life and Work, Including a Catalogue Raisonné, (MA thesis, University of Natal, 1988), 35. »

45 John X. Merriman, The Natal Mercury, January 17, 1913, 7, as quoted in Foster, Washed with Sun, 54. »

46 Catalogue of Pictures by R. Gwelo Goodman (Johannesburg, 1916), as quoted in Melanie Hillebrand, “Art and Architecture in Natal, 1910–1940” (PhD diss., University of Natal, 1986), 91. »

47 Foster, Washed with Sun. This idea also underpins J. M. Coetzee’s reflections on South African literature in J. M. Coetzee, White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988). »

48 Dirk Klopper, “An Unsettled Habitation: Narratives of South African Landscape,” in The Lie of the Land: Representations of the South African Landscape, ed. Michael Godby (Cape Town: South African National Gallery, 2010), 39–45. »

49 As discussed in Cherryl Walker, “Looking Forward, Looking Back: Beyond the Narrative of Loss and Restoration in the History of Land,” in Godby, Lie of the Land. These policies would only become more restrictive with time, and they would also extend to the South Asian and “colored” population in the 1930s. Further legislation would mandate the segregation of “colored” and Indian populations. See William Beinart and Peter Delius, “The Historical Context and Legacy of the Natives Land Act of 1913,” Journal of South African Studies 40, no. 4 (2014): 667–88. »

50 As quoted in Foster, Washed with Sun, 53. »

51 Roworth enrolled twice in the Slade School, first in 1911 and then again in 1914, according to an e-mail exchange with Robert Winckworth, Senior Library Assistant, University College London Special Collections, Archives, and Records, September 3, 2018. »

52 “In Camera,” South Africa News, November 30, 1906, news clipping, South African National Gallery archive, as quoted in Proud, “Advancement of Art,” 11. »

53 Proud, “Advancement of Art,” 11. »

54 Robins, “British Impressionism,” 84–85. »

55 Nicholas Coetzer, Building Apartheid: On Architecture and Order in Imperial Cape Town (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2013). »

56 Alan Lester, Imperial Networks: Creating Identities in Nineteenth-Century South Africa and Britain (London: Routledge, 2001), 189. »

57 Edward Roworth, “Landscape Art in South Africa,” in Art of the British Empire Overseas, ed. Charles Holme (London: “The Studio,” 1917), 115–42. Christine Boyanski, “Selective Memory: The British Empire Exhibition and National Histories of Art,” in Rethinking Settler Colonialism: History and Memory in Australia, Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand, and South Africa, ed. Annie E. Coombes (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 156–70. »

58 Roworth, “Landscape Art in South Africa,” 116. »

59 Roworth, “Landscape Art,” 117. »

60 Press clipping dated November 16, 1904, from the SANG archive, as quoted in Proud, “Advancement of Art,” 39. »

61 “Portraits of Famous South African Artists, Part II,” Cape Argus Weekly, December 26, 1906, II. »

62 As discussed in Anna Tietze, A History of the Iziko South African National Gallery: Reflections on Art and National Identity (Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2017), 64–65. »

63 Foster, Washed with Sun, 69. »

64 Evelyn Cohen, “Early Training and French Vision in South African Art Prior to 1920,” in Paris and South African Artists, 1850–1965, ed. Lucy Alexander, Emma Bedford, and Evelyn Cohen (Cape Town: South African National Gallery, 1988), 12. »

65 Homi K. Bhabha, “Race, Time and the Revision of Modernity,” in The Post-Colonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (London: Routledge 2006), 219. »

66 For an opinionated overview of “colonialism of a special type,” see Nicholas Visser, “Postcoloniality of a Special Type: Theory and Its Appropriations in South Africa,” Yearbook of English Studies 27 (1997): 79–94. J. M. Coetzee uses the phrase “internal colony” to describe South Africa after the victory of the National Party in the elections of 1948. See J. M. Coetzee, White Writing: On the Culture of Letters in South Africa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 11. »

67 David Atwell, “Interview with Homi Bhabha,” Current Writing 5, no. 2 (October 1993): 100–113, as quoted on 112. »

68 Saul Dubow, “How British Was the British World? The Case of South Africa,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 37 (March 2007): 3. »

69 This process of imperial migration is outlined in Kent Fedorowich and Andrew S. Thompson, “Mapping the Contours of the British World: Empire, Migration, and Identity,” in Empire, Migration, and Identity in the British World, ed. Kent Fedorowich, Andrew S. Thompson, and Keith Povey (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 1–41. »

70 Patricia Leighten, “The White Peril and L’Art négre: Picasso, Primitivism, and Anticolonialism,” Art Bulletin 72, no. 4 (December 1990): 609–30. For a discussion of this dynamic in relation to the art produced in settler colonies of the British Empire, see Nicholas Thomas, Possessions: Indigenous Art/Colonial Culture (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999). »

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