Context (Acquisition Details)
Purchased from Michael Graham Stewart with funds provided by The Art Fund, 2012. Graham-Stewart is a London-based art dealer, (38 Old Born Street, London, Greater London, W1S 4QW), who specialises in topographical views and objects from Africa, Australasia, the Pacific and the Americas.

Michael Graham Stewart's catalogue 'Africa 8.3.2012' featured this picture and noted 'It was not unusual in the 20th century for indigenous peoples to be given art materials and encouraged to draw, paint or sculpt. Usually the facilitator was of European stock and one who saw art production as beneficial to those adjusting to the shifting realities of life under colonial incursion. One such was Canon Edward (Ned) Paterson. Born in Aberdeen, the family moved to South Africa when he was five. He saw action in WWI in the Namibian and East African campaigns then studied at London Central School of Art and Craft. Here his influences ranged from John Ruskin and William Morris to Laurence Binyon and Eric Gill. He only converted to Christianity after returning to South Africa, and soon became an Anglican priest. He spent the next 15 years
serving as a railway missioner and in schools where he acquired a reputation for beautifying church buildings.

The Bishop of Southern Rhodesia invited Paterson to found a skills oriented primary school at the Cyrene Mission situated in the Matopo Hills out of Bulawayo. As there was no age restriction as to when boys could undergo primary education many students were in their late teens or early 20s. Paterson believed that an academic education alienated students from their village life and that an art-heavy curriculum could ameliorate the problems caused by urbanization and industrialization. Students should be enabled to connect with the deep rhythms in nature and also to break with the cultural slavery of Christianity in Africa. The chapel altarpiece showed Christ as African and the walls were decorated with murals by the students. In The Last Judgement Our Lord holds an adze and a mealie-cob, intended (as Paterson wrote in the regular newsletter, The Cyrene Papers, in 1943) to remind attendees that the Reckoning may include the question 'What have you made and what have you grown?'

Circumstances, in the form of severe droughts for the first few seasons, promoted aesthetics over agriculture. After the terrible harvest of 1942 Paterson wrote that day after day, week after week, month after month, one suffers with the slowly dying plant life. In such a time one grasps one's kinship with nature. Paterson believed it was God's work to make a man good, our work to make him interesting to himself. He also thought it important, like Geoffrey Bardon at Papunya in Central Australia in the early 1970s, not to influence the subject matter or style of the students' work. However, students would have been aware of existing SPG (the missionary arm of the Church of England) published volumes, such as D.J. Fleming's Son of Man: Pictures and carvings by Indian, African and Chinese Artists (1939). Paterson was adept at tapping into the public relations potential of the works in an era of paternalistic colonialism. The first exhibition was held in Bulawayo and Queen Mary visited Cyrene on one of her spare afternoons after seeing paintings in Government House. She went on to purchase work from the first London showing, held at the galleries of the Royal Watercolour Society in 1949. This exhibition subsequently toured the country and was followed by another in 1954. Two films were made, one (Pitaniko, 1946) featuring the painter Sam Songo in the title role.

Bewitching images that communicate the 'spirit of country' seen in the first flush of paintings by peoples with no tradition of figurative representation are, by definition, unsustainable. The apparently innocent charm of, to use Paterson's words, a large imperial sheet crammed to the sky with every imaginable sort of detail: rocks, trees, trees, animals, villages and people could only belong to a certain finite era. From the mid 1950s contemporary art in Rhodesia was dominated by Frank McEwen, first Director of the National Gallery in Salisbury. Soon after that politics pervaded and many art producers worked on the now ubiquitous soapstone carvings, shows of which still tour the globe.'

The on-line sale catalogue for Charterhouse Auctioneers & Valuers, The Long Street Salerooms Sherborne Dorset, 13-14th December 2011 recorded the picture as the following, ‘920
African school, figures, animals and birds in a landscape, watercolour, inscribed Annet MusenziSambana Cyrene 1944, 50 x 71 cm £100 - 150'. [http://www.scribd.com/doc/74892909/Charterhouse-13-and-14-Dec-2011-Antiques-Catalogue]

Event Date 3/8/2012
Author: maa

Description (CMS Description)
Watercolour painting, with black ink outlines by Annet Musenzi Sambana. The painting shows a biblical and village scene, showing people, huts and trees, with dogs, a donkey and chickens, as well as a hunting scene and wild birds such as guinea fowl. There are three angels flying in the sky, on reading ?the bible. Inscribed with the artist's name, date, (1944) and 'Cyrene'.
Event Date 3/8/2012
Author: maa

Context (Display)
Exhibited: On display in the exhibition 'Gifts & Discoveries' between May 25 2012 and February 18 2013.
Event Date 19/2/2013
Author: Remke van der Velden