Cape Town Harbour
Oil on Canvas
69 x 87cm (excl. frame)
80 x 98 x 5cm (incl. frame)
Signed: “Irma Stern” (Lower/Left)
Dated: 1957
“And what she knows of Africa, the heart of it; all her pictures breathe it out…” Cape Times 1929
Irma Stern was a prominent South African artist who attained national and international recognition in her lifetime.
Born in the Transvaal of Jewish-German parents, Stern spent her earliest years in South Africa. Following the Boer War, Stern and her family returned to Germany and began travelling frequently, which was to later influence her works and progress as an artist.
From 1913-1920 Stern studied in Germany where she became associated with the German Expressionists of this period, one of her greatest influences. They encouraged her work and assisted her in arranging her first exhibition in Berlin in 1919. Stern returned to Cape Town in 1920 where she was initially disapproved of. Her work was not understood by the artistically unadventurous citizens. Stern, however, persisted with her vocation, with energetic brushwork and vivid use of colour in her numerous portraits, still life paintings and landscapes and was regarded as an established artist by the 1940s.
Large in scale, this bright energetic work displays the iconic image of Table Mountain wearing her table cloth. The colourful boats in the foreground give a playful edge to this image, and the confident composition displays Stern’s self-assurance as an artist
What is especially striking about this harbour scene, is the central pathway, or rather, the waterway that leads one’s eye, as well as the ships, to the centre of the picture, namely the harbour, with the mountain in the background. In addition, the ships and boats to the sides of this waterway form a sort of guard of honour for the eye. This painting is part of Stern’s small oeuvre of harbour scenes that she was fond of painting and other examples of French, Portuguese and Spanish harbours do exist. This work, from her late period, is executed in an abstract style: boats and building are simplified and rendered abstract to suggest the essence of the place, rather than a realistic depiction of the scene. What is important is that she captured the spirit of a harbour in this painting.
Stern undertook numerous trips by boat, especially in the early part of the 20th century between South Africa and Germany, when travelling by air was not an option. Her early diaries attest to the romance that harbours held for her, and in the biography of her early life, by Karel Schoemann, one is constantly reminded that harbours had a special place in her life. Her first romantic encounter, for example, was on a boat in such a harbour.