Oil On Board|Signed Bottom Left|1932
Note : At the Sea 1932 by Maggie Laubser has an interesting provenance. When research was conducted for the Catalogue Raisonné of Laubser’s oeuvre, initially by Liz Delmont in the 1970s and later by Dalene Marais (finally published in 1994),[i] the owner of At the Sea had not been traced. The only record of this work was a photograph in the collection of Dr Elza Miles. Miles (under her birth name Botha) was awarded her Masters dissertation on the work of Maggie Laubser by the University of Pretoria in 1964. The photograph is annotated on the back: At the sea: painted 1932, Maggie Laubser, 9, By die see (olieverf) 1932. In December 1931 – March 1932, as part of a growing South African nationalism, the First Annual Exhibition of Contemporary National Art was organized by what was then the South African National Gallery together with the South African Association of Artists. Laubser participated in both this exhibition, (her work was very unfavourably reviewed by the deeply conservative art critic Bernard Lewis), and in all the following annual exhibitions which, from 1933-4 onwards, were titled Annual Exhibition of Contemporary South African Art. At the Sea was exhibited at the Fifth Annual Exhibition of Contemporary South African Art 18 Dec 1935 - end Feb 1936 (catalogue number 42).[ii] Not all critics were as damning of Laubser’s work as Bernard Lewis. The very influential Modernist art historian Prof A.C. Bouman referred to Laubser’s two works on exhibition as “die beste op die hele tentoonstelling” with an illustration of At the Sea.[iii] The painting was also illustrated in in an article by Z.M. Silva entitled “An artist devoted to farm life”.[iv] Interestingly there are three other works (as well as preparatory drawings in one of Laubser’s sketchbooks) which are very similar to this work on auction, although two of them (Marais and Delmont nos 587 and 589) are much smaller and painted on cardboard, probably as studies for the larger works on board: Marais and Delmont no 590 and the work on auction here .[v]
Liz Delmont
