Gerard Bhengu: Inyanga in traditional dress - SOLD

Gerard Bhengu
Inyanga in traditional dress
Watercolour
35 x 26 cm
Signed bottom left
Sold - 2009

Born 6 September 1910, Mariannhill Mission Station, Centecow, Southern Natal
Died 26 October 1990 at the age of 80, Umlazi, Durban

Gerard Bhengu started drawing with charcoal from the cooking fire on the walls at home as a child. Fortunately his artistic development was encouraged, by providing him with crayons, when his teachers spotted his natural talent at school. A medical doctor at the Mariannhill Mission hospital, Dr. Max Kohler, noticed Bhengu’s artistic talent while treating him for tuberculosis in the 1920’s, and commissioned him to record the various local Zulu face markings. Bhengu painted more studies of models from the area on commission for Dr. Kohler’s anthropological research from 1926 to 1931, and these illustrations were published in Marriage Customs in Southern Natal (1933) and The Izangoma Diviners (1941).

The two highly finished studies of herbalists, or inyanga, illustrated here were in all probability also a commission. The emphasis on characterization, as well as the heavy background painted in blue/black, is typical of Bhengu’s stylistic mannerisms in works belonging to the 1926 to 1931 period.

The painting of the herbalist in traditional costume is convincing, and appears to be an actual portrait, because if it had been romanticized, the man would most likely have been dressed in more traditional regalia. The old army great-coat worn by the other herbalist is typical of those that elderly men from that region wore for decades, and is thus also authentic.

We would like to thank Ms Yvonne Winters, Senior Museologist at the Campbell Collections, housed at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, for her assistance with the research of these works.

Bibliography:
Elza Miles, Land and Lives, Cape Town, 1997, pp 27 to 32
Steven Sack, The Neglected Tradition: Towards a New History of South African Art (1930-1988), Johannesburg, 1988, pp 11 and 101

To view the Gerard Bhengu web pages click here