Framing Landscape: the Picturesque & the Sublime

Against a backdrop of knobbly grey mountains and a cloud-stained sky, the once magnificent South African National Gallery adorns the Government Avenue Gardens like a huge slice of architecturally colonial wedding cake.

The mish-mash of Doric columns, tiled cornices, mosaic niches, and Cape-Dutch windows makes for an awkward façade. Yet perhaps this is an accurate reflection of Cape Town’s own complex and convoluted history, which is in itself, is a mish-mash of cultures, colonisers, and controversy.

The Gallery’s permanent collection leans heavily towards the contemporary, with vast, vacuous rooms dedicated to artworks made from plastic bags and soil. It’s certainly not for everyone, although the collection does offer some respite through internationally acclaimed works by Irma Stern, Moses Tladi, and John Mohl, not to mention a wonderful exhibition of drawings from the permanent collection.

Once you have waded through the displays of challenging contemporary themes, you discover the gallery’s most recent exhibition. ‘Framing Landscape: The Picturesque and The Sublime’ is irresistible. Small but pleasantly formed, the exhibition encourages the viewer to consider the development of the romantic landscape alongside the expansion of European colonialism. It questions whether the African landscape could ever have found its place within such a euro-centric genre, and considers “the historical insecurity regarding the place of the artist of European heritage in the African landscape”, which is concluded to be an “insecurity not without cause”.

Through the works of Heinrich Wilhelm Hermann, John Roland Brown, Jans Wijnants, and prints by JMW Turner (to name but a few), the exhibition draws the somewhat complex distinction between the concepts of the sublime and the picturesque, between emotion, glory, and aesthetic idealism.