Footnotes

• PROVENANCE:
  Family of Charles Newberry
  Thence by descent to the current owner
  
  
  This beautiful scene of the Matapos captures the vastness and grandeur of the region south of Bulawayo where Cecil John Rhodes requested to be buried with "a view of the world". Pieter Hugo Naudé was similarly moved by the scene, encountered during his travels to Victoria Falls in 1897, having returned from his studies abroad the previous year. With its close attention to the effects of light and the modulations of colour in the specifically southern African environment, the work reflects Esmé Berman's assertion that "it is not without significance... that Hugo Naudé is reputed to have spent time at Barbizon before he returned to Worcester in 1896. Undoubtedly the plein-airist approach to capturing the appearance of the outdoor scene had coincided in Naudé's mind with his own acute awareness of the [landscape's] bright and spacious nature".
  
  Born in Brampton, England, brothers John and Charles Newbury emmigrated to Natal, South Africa, in 1864, but went to work on the bustling diamond mines of Kimberley in the early 1870s. Charles Newberry became a major shareholder in Cecil John Rhodes' Central Mining Company and, upon the consolidation of independent claims and the creation of De Beers, Charles' brother John became one of its first directors, while Charles used the opportunity to fulfil the long-held dream of building a classical English country estate – Prynnsberg – near the Maluti Mountains. Charles Newberry and his wife, Elizabeth Daniel (daughter of the Rev. John. T. Daniel who ran the Weslyan Mission Station near Fiksburg), collected numerous items of local art and artefacts in the late nineteenth century.
  
  E. Berman, Painting in South Africa, (Johannesburg, 1993), p.16