Interior of a Boer House
Oil on Canvas
46.5 x 61cm
Signed: “Frans Oerder” (Lower/Right)
Provenance: Private Collection
Exhibitions: “Imaging and Imagining: South African Art c. 1896 – 2008”, Graham’s Fine Art Gallery, Johannesburg, 2009.
Illustrated: Graham’s Fine Art Gallery. 2008. Imaging and Imagining: South African Art c. 1896 – 2008. Johannesburg. P 92 & 93.
Interior of a Boer House, painted in 1896, is a significant work not only as a confirmed example of Oerder’s early painting style, but also as a compassionate expression of his identification with the Boers. Moreover, the work is of cultural and historical significance as an artistic record of a way of life that has all but disappeared.
Painted in the year he became a burgher of the ZAR (Berman, 1974: 272), Interior of a Boer House appears to have been conceived as a domestic scene in the style of Dutch genre painter Jan Steen (1626 – 1679). Immensely popular in 17th century Holland, Steen’s fully packed, finely detailed descriptions of interior scenes and archetypal characters engaged in typical commercial, domestic or recreational activities remain iconic of Dutch realism.
Like most of Oerder’s work, Interior of a Boer House is a study in tonal values to the near exclusion of colour. The composition is defined by daylight streaming in through a curtainless window and partially open door. Painstaking attention to detail reveals the artist’s deep fascination with Boer culture and imbues the scene with the honesty of close observation. In deep perspective, it reads like a sober narrative, different descriptive moments filling different parts of the format and exhibiting none of the romanticism of, for example, Still Life with Spanish Guitar, also illustrated in this catalogue.
Counterbalancing the sombre silence of the human figures and the solitary shotgun against the wall, two playful puppies in the foreground bring some levity. With the hindsight of history, however, we can intuit a sense of foreboding to this scene: in another three years, houses like this one would be razed to the ground, women like this one herded into concentration camps and men like these transformed into rag-tag guerillas engaged in a futile conflict with Great Britain, the second South African War (1899 to 1902).
Frans Oerder joined in this fray as a volunteer member of the Hollander Corps (Duffey 1990:1), a position which led to his appointment as South Africa’s first official war artist. Ironically, the war which brought him a professional appointment would also devastate the economy of his adoptive country, compelling his return to Europe in 1908 in order to make a living from his painting. He was not to return to South Africa for another 30 years.
by Antoinette du Plessis
Bibliography: Duffey, A. E. 1990. Frans Oerder in Natal during the Anglo-Boer War. South African Journal of Art and Architectural History , 1 (1), 1-15.