George Pemba: Portrait of a man in traditional dress - SOLD
George Pemba (1912 - 2001)
Portrait of a man in traditional dress - 1950
Watercolour
32 x 24 cm
Signed and dated bottom left
Sold - 2012
George Pemba’s career spanned six decades from the 1940s to 2001, and his paintings provide a visual history of what he had witnessed in a dramatically transforming South Africa. Working mostly in isolation, he established himself as a pioneer of social realism, taking his inspiration from the realities and struggles of urban black people’s everyday lives in a troubled country.
PROVENANCE
Presented to Lowell de Wolf by his “Sun” students at the Ford factory, Port Elizabeth, August 1955.
ILLUSTRATED
Michael Stevenson & Joost Bosland, ‘Take your road and travel along’: The advent of the modern black painter in Africa, Cape Town, 2008, p 85