SAN PORTRAYED IN EARLY 18TH CENTURY SKETCHES

SOON after starting work in the National Library’s picture collection in the 1990s, I realised that there was a dearth of historical art depicting the Cape Colony and all its inhabitants during the first 150 years of settlement.

Although educated travellers made drawings that were sometimes engraved and published in Europe, local officials and burghers seemed to lack both the talent and the inclination to sketch the scenery, people and natural wonders that surrounded them.

Some talented San artists were acutely sensitive to the dispossession and disruption the foreigners caused, but their artworks were hidden in caves and shelters and their significance was ignored until the descendants of the people who produced them were on the verge of extinction.

Visitors who took an interest in the Khoisan often portrayed them as outlandish people with repulsive habits. However, a notable early exception is a series of pleasing and lifelike drawings by a Dutch artist who visited the Cape in about 1700, which are preserved in the National Library. Other sympathetic artists included the explorers Robert Jacob Gordon (1743-1795) and Francois Le Vaillant (1753-1824).

Meanwhile, slaves (who numbered more than 15 000 in 1785) are all but invisible in the visual record.

In recent years, several 18th century sketches and paintings have emerged from Sweden which include competent depictions of Cape flora and fauna, panoramas, agrarian activities and a vigorous drawing of three ordinary burghers playing cards. Although the farm scenes were painted in a vast, seemingly empty valley, small figures in the landscape represent Khoikhoi wagon drivers and agricultural slaves.

The artist was a gifted amateur named Jan Brandes (1743-1808), a Dutch Lutheran minister who was posted to Batavia in 1778. His tenure was marked by the birth of his only son and the death of his wife from dysentery, which may have prejudiced him against the Orient. His ministry was unhappy and he appears to have channelled his depression into hundreds of drawings and paintings intended for personal use.

After resigning in 1785, Brandes and his son Jantje (aged 6) left Batavia on a VOC ship and spent four months on the island of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). They arrived at the Cape in April 1786 and lodged for a month with Rev Andreas Kolver of the Lutheran Church in Strand Street, a wide thoroughfare which Brandes painted in fascinating detail.

Having made another application to pause his onward passage, Brandes moved to Vergenoegd near presentday Faure in the Hottentots Holland Valley, the scene of most of his South African works.

The farm was then a tedious eight-hour journey by wagon from Cape Town. Those who speed towards the Strand and Somerset West today will scarcely believe how unoccupied and desolate the valley appeared 230 years ago.

More next week.

Talented San artists were acutely sensitive to the dispossession the foreigners caused, but the art was hidden in caves