In the wonderful article below, James Walton traces the journey of Johannes Cornelius Poortermans through the Piquetberg. The piece first appeared in the October 1982 edition of Restorica, the journal of the Simon van der Stel Foundation (today the Heritage Association of South Africa). Thank you to the University of Pretoria (copyright holders) for giving us permission to publish).
Johannes Cornelius Poortermans was a painter and lithographer who lived at the Cape from 1833 until his death at Paarl in 1870. His life and work have been fully described in several publications and many of his paintings and lithographs have been frequently reproduced, especially his Cape Town street scenes and his illustrations of country churches.
He spent a large part of 1848 in Saldanha Bay, painting the farms and other buildings in the bay, and on his painting of Philips Kraal he wrote, 'I spent two years in this healthy region'. The two years were 1848 and 1849, but in 1849 he concentrated on the farms in the Piquetberg and his paintings afford a record of the vernacular architecture of an area which probably has no parallel anywhere else in the country. The value of his paintings depends, however, on their authenticity, and in 1965 I visited the various farms which he illustrated in order to ascertain if any of the buildings which he painted had survived, hoping thereby to verify the accuracy of his records. Several study tours were made subsequently.
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