If you’re like me, and consider yourself a bookish person even though most of your “reading” involves emails and WhatsApp messages — or other kinds of doomscrolling through a combination of text and image on your phone — then you probably spend 11 months of the year fantasising about Bilfs: Books I’d Like to Finish. Or, in some cases, books you’d be happy just to start.
They gather in daunting piles on the bedside table, as downloads on a Kindle, or perhaps even in vague mental lists. Thank goodness for December, when lying on a couch with a book in your hands is a socially mandated activity. It feels virtuous and admirable. The consequence of all this, dear reader, is that there are some books your trusty arts columnist wants to write about. So January will be a literary month.
First up: Michael Stevenson’s weighty tome on colonial British artist Samuel Daniell. Best known as an art dealer — his eponymous galleries in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Amsterdam have become a crucial component of the African art scene, and the recent closure of the Johannesburg space is a blow to the city’s cultural ecosystem — Stevenson is also an accomplished scholar (he completed a PhD on the Randlords and South African art collections three decades ago).
In an insightful foreword to the book, the eminent historian Nigel Penn notes that Stevenson was uniquely positioned to undertake the task: “Nobody but an art dealer could possibly have tracked down so many of the works of Daniell in order to compile such an extensive catalogue raisonné. And nobody but an art historian could have been so alert to the sensitivity and sensuousness of Daniell’s art.”
The bringing together of such a vast array of material is a significant achievement indeed, and Daniell is a figure well worth salvaging from obscurity. One would not expect that an artist whose work forms a significant part of the visual record of colonial (and, in some cases, precolonial) life in South Africa would be at risk of consignment to oblivion. Yet Daniell left very little text to accompany his enormous artistic portfolio and, in this sense, he did not really inscribe himself into the historical record.
Intriguing colonial and class dynamics are at play here. Daniell came from a renowned family of professional artists. His uncle Thomas and his brother William documented India for viewers in England; it is hardly surprising that Samuel did something similar in journeying to South Africa and later Ceylon (now Sri Lanka).
Intriguing colonial and class dynamics are at play here.
He arrived at the Cape in 1800 in the service of George Yonge, the newly appointed governor of what had only become a British territory a few years previously. Before long, Yonge would be packing his bags and leaving in disgrace, followed by a corruption scandal that split Cape colonial society into acrimonious factions. Daniell did not navigate these circumstances especially well, soon finding himself on the wrong side of the redoubtable Anne Barnard: diarist, traveller, painter, and one of the most influential people at the Cape.
While it seems that Barnard was primarily to blame for the feud — she had copied an unknown number of Daniell’s drawings and sketches without his permission — it was young Daniell who came off second best. She was “an aristocratic woman of great social standing, who was also an amateur artist”; he was “a young unknown … entirely dependent on the patronage of the great and the good”.
In the end, Daniell travelled even more widely than Barnard, joining several expeditions that took him to the Eastern Cape, territories north of the Orange River, and elsewhere. He produced remarkable portraits and landscapes, affirming the beauty of the place and its peoples. While the British imperial project unquestionably shaped his work, and his view of his subjects was informed by a yearning for the picturesque and the exotic appeal of the “noble savage”, the lovingly rendered detail of his images — sometimes borrowing from the conventions of European portraiture, but often transcending these — gives them tremendous value as records of material cultures in communities that were not yet fragmented and displaced by colonial incursion.
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