HEADLINES:
R/€ Military men with an artist's eye for early San and Khoi
October 02, 2006 Edition 1
Who was the all-but-forgotten frontier artist who painted sympathetic and accurate San and Khoi portraits during the early 19th century?
Although numerous sketches of the Cape's indigenous inhabitants appeared in travel books during the VOC period, they were often portrayed as uncouth or grotesque people with repulsive customs.
A notable early exception is a series of pleasing and lifelike drawings by a Dutch artist who visited the Cape in about 1700, which are preserved in the National Library of South Africa.
Other perceptive artists included the famous explorers Robert Jacob Gordon (1743-1795) and Francois Le Vaillant (1753-1824), but skills like theirs were all too rare at the Cape, and were non-existent among the burghers.
In the early 1800s a few ex-military men from Europe began to paint small water-colours of scenery and "native types" which they sold to supplement their meagre incomes.
Heinrich Joseph Klein (1767-1810) was a former German sergeant who became head of the Latin School in Cape Town.
He produced a number of competent landscapes and a series of Khoi portraits that show the depressing effects of more than a century of subjugation and Westernisation. The National Library holds a small album of his work, dated 1802.
A fellow-countryman named Steeb who worked in the Graaff-Reinet district 10 years later is less well-documented, although the late Alfred Gordon-Brown attempted to unravel the riddle of his identity in 1975.
The most likely candidate appears to be Johan Fredrik Steeb, a native of Tübingen in Würtemburg, who was apparently a member of a well-to-do family with military traditions.
Soon after the British took the Cape for the second time in 1806, Steeb petitioned Sir David Baird for a commission in the Hottentot Corps, explaining that he had served with the army of the emperor of Germany prior to taking his discharge.
He then joined a Dutch legion and served as a lieutenant in Java, but was released from duty in August 1803 owing to ill-health.
He arrived at the Cape during the short Batavian regime (1803-6) and underwent a successful course of treatment at the hot baths.
However, his funds were exhausted and he was in need of employment. Steeb's request for a commission was fruitless, but he was given permission to remain in the colony and seems to have found work as an itinerant meester (teacher) out in the frontier districts.
Home instruction was of vital importance in a vast country that had virtually no schools, but temporary teachers in burgher households were seldom held in high esteem, and they often earned little more than their keep.
Burghers tended to look down on other Christians - no matter how clever - who were not farmers or property owners.
On the other hand, many of the meesters were ex-soldiers with shady pasts and dissolute habits who were almost as ignorant as their pupils.
Steeb seems to have been one of the better teachers.
In March 1812 the English traveller and botanist William Burchell (1782-1863) met an unidentified meester (apparently Steeb) at the isolated farm Kriegersfontein in the Agter-Sneeuwberge, north of Graaff-Reinet, where he had spent the previous 12 months instructing the three sons of the owner, Piet Vermeulen.
He proved to be a well-travelled man who mentioned his accomplish-ments without boastfulness, and Burchell welcomed the chance to talk about subjects other than agriculture - the sole topic of conversation at most farm houses.
Steeb showed the visitor some small paintings he had made using the juice of oxalis petals and brushes made from springbok hair. Burchell was glad to be able to supply him with a few artists' materials, including camel-hair brushes, and he admired the teacher's fine penmanship.
There is evidence that Steeb used Burchell's gifts to produce sketches of the Khoi and San people who lived in the vicinity, selling some to visitors who took them to England.
In 1822 three of these water-colours were included in a collection of eight reproductions of portraits of indigenous people supposedly made by a British officer stationed at the Cape in 1812.
These rare coloured lithographs are now extremely valuable. They were all attributed to "An Officer of the 21st Light Dragoons", but 136 years later one of the original sketches turned up in London, captioned in Dutch and signed "F. Steeb".
For a long time it seemed as though this was the only one of Steeb's frontier sketches to have survived, but I'm pleased to report that the Western Cape Archives has several more examples of his work, executed c.1812-13.
© 1999 - 2010 Cape Argus & Independent Online (Pty) Ltd. All rights reserved.