Still Life With Jug And Apples ,1948
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Notes : Erik Laubscher studied under Maurice van Essche at the Continental School of Art in Cape Town in 1946 and 1947 after being rejected by Michaelis Art School “because he could not draw” (Chisholm 2013). It was on Van Essche’s recommendation that he left South Africa in 1948 to study in London and spent short bursts at reputable institutions and with numerous well-known artists of the time. He studied portrait drawing under Frank Slater, a student of Walter Sickert, and then enrolled at the newly established Anglo-French Art Centre in St John’s Wood where his teachers included John Minton, Claude Venard and John Berger. In 1949 he returned to South Africa before moving to Paris in 1950 to further his tuition at the Académie Montmartre where the Cubist painter Fernand Léger proved to be a major influence in Laubscher’s career.
Still Life with Jug and Apples was painted by a 21-year-old Laubscher, prior to Léger’s influence. This sill life is painted in a mannered style that reflected his youthful interest in pre-war modernism, with the planes flattened and objects depicted without any perspectival recession; the sensuous quality of the paint reminiscent of that of Van Essche’s approach. Next to the stylised and angular jug Laubscher introduces three apples as the warm focal point.
In 2009 a still life by Laubscher painted in 1952 fetched R1,2 million at an auction in Cape Town, at the time the highest amount paid for a work by a living South African artist in South Africa.
Johan Myburg
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