Jacob Hendrik Pierneef

London, Bonhams, The South African Sale Part 2, 18 February 2009, Lot 62

Acquired from the above sale by the present owner

Acacia Trees in the Veld is exemplary of South African painter Jacob Hendrik Pierneef's famed bushveld (or 'veld') scenes. Over the course of his long and hallowed career, which mirrored the rise of Afrikaner nationalism in South Africa in the wake of independence from the British, Pierneef's elegant and simplified portrayals would come to define South African landscape painting of that period.

Land proved to be central in defining the identity and ideology of the emerging nation. National mythology was centered on Voorktrekkers and their migration from the Cape to the Transvaal, and Pierneef depicted the South African landscape in a way that expressed its unique character and the Afrikaner’s attachment to the land. Many of these national ideas were synonymous with religious righteousness, and Pierneef’s Edenic landscapes can be interpreted as depictions of God’s Promised Land. This dream of an idealised perfect landscape was shared by many South Africans, who came to see their country through Pierneef’s eyes.

The present lot depicts a genus of tree that is native to Africa and a hallmark of the bushveld. By painting an indigenous subject Pierneef asserts the Afrikans connection to the South African natural landscape, embracing it both physically and artistically, as ‘home’. Pierneef’s actions, being of Dutch origin himself, highlight the long-standing complexities and nuances of identity politics in South Africa. 

Born in Pretoria to a Hollander and Trekker family, Pierneef would come to be recognised as the pre-eminent Afrikaner artist. The years following the end of the Boer War (during which time the Pierneef family relocated to the Netherlands) and the Union of South Africa in 1910 saw a period of nation-building and the creation of a national identity, in which the artist was actively involved. He was a member of the Afrikaner Broederband, a secret organisation founded in 1918 by an emerging elite of Afrikaner nationalists, like-minded intellectuals and artists, who actively promoted the idea of a unique Afrikaner culture in order to influence political power. In 1929 he was a founding member of the Afrikaner cultural association Federasie van Afrikaanse Kultuurvereniginge (FAK), and in 1932 he wrote ‘it would be a disaster if we allowed ourselves to be dictated to by such outsiders as to what African art is. And since Art is the spontaneous and highest expression of our people, who are of Dutch origin, it is essential that we as Afrikaners should take care that no foreign influences creep into our heart’ (as quoted in Nessa Liebhammer (ed.), Art from the African Continent, Johannesburg, 2005, p.26).