Footnotes

Provenance
A private collection.

Please note, this work will be sold unframed.

In this rare and outstanding work by Pieter Hugo Naudé, we can see his formal training in portraiture and scene painting synonymous with Western early 20th century style. These techniques and styles were learnt by the artist upon his travels to Europe at the beginning of his career. Raised on farmland himself, Naudé displays two workers grinding corn in the foreground, very possibly an exercise that would have been carried out on his family farm in Worcester. Grinding the Mealies permits a strikingly naturalistic insight into the artist's domestic life and further allows a view into the broad spectrum of Naudé's talent and technique given his abstracted later works.

The tonal use of a brown palette provides depth of light given the composition of the window set in the background of the work, allowing a sense of perspective. This compositional technique is reminiscent of early 20th century European scene painting. It could be argued that the present work is therefore indicative of the artist's training at the Slade School of Art in England, studying from 1889 to 1890 under Alhonse Legros. Indeed, similarities in composition and a colour technique can be drawn between the present work and works such as Le Repas des Pauvres (1877) by Legros.

'In his early works, of which some are interiors, his style is traditional but sincere. We see groups of people in a homely setting, with many reminiscences of Dutch art.' (Bouman, 1951, p.41)

However, the present work would have been completed upon Naudé's return from Europe to South Africa and the farm in 1896 as it was executed in 1900. Following an economic decline, his hometown of Worcester had just received municipal status (30th September 1895), thus an evolvement of classism and segregation ensued. Naudé's niece, Adéle, recalled how "Artist" (as he was affectionately known) and his wife, Julie, worked closely to support the Black and marginalised communities in the area of Worcester, particularly in health care. The intimacy of the present work may bare a reflection of this closeness, perhaps unusual of the time given the rising racial inequality at the end of the 19th century.

Bibliography
A.C. Bouman, Painters of South Africa, (Cape Town, 1951)
Adéle Naudé, Hugo Naudé, (Cape Town and Johannesburg: C. Struik Publishes, 1974)