More than half of the over 1000 paintings and other two-dimensional artworks in the Standard Bank Corporate Art Collection portray the enduringly popular landscape painting genre. They nevertheless represent a microcosm of nearly 200 hundred years of South African art history, offering a range of views of this sub-continent by early Dutch and British settlers.

They depict scenes ranging from the unspoilt beauty of the land, through to the nationalistically inspired works of Pierneef and Coetzer, to the portrayals of postcolonial tensions of artists such as Sam Nhlengethwa, Willie Bester and Santu Mofokeng.

With the expansion of the Cape colony, came exploration, which saw the emergence of often self-styled artist/explorers. Their self-imposed task was to capture the pristine landscape even as it was forever altered by the expeditions they accompanied. Thomas Baines was probably the best known of the artist/explorers represented in this collection.

Fingoes Washing Sheep, 1849, depicts his intention to “making faithful representations of the general features of the country” and to “draw average specimens of the different tribes”. This piece depicts a rock pool framed by lush vegetation and surrounding hills. Included are the naked Fingoes (AmaMfengu, who settled in the Eastern cape after fleeing the Zulu Kingdom in the 1820s), in a pool of water, washing their sheep. Sluiceways channel water into the pool, indicating human control over natural processes. A clothed white man stands above the pool on a rocky outcrop with his arms folded, surveying the scene in a proprietary manner. The resulting effect is that of an African wilderness, ‘ordered’ and domesticated’ by a ‘civilizing’ western presence.

Baines’s use of colour and saturated rhythmic brushstrokes conveys the multitude of textures and patterns of the vegetation and rock formations. Various species of flora can be readily identified, but also simultaneously form part of a vast animated African tapestry rather than just a flat surfaced scientific study. His brilliant palette, of Prussian blue, Venetian red, crimson, emerald green and chrome yellow, communicates the harshness of the African light even as he describes the hazy sunlight filtering through the canopy of trees, and the softer washes of the subtly toned sky.

Baines sought acknowledgement as an explorer with the Royal Geographical Society rather than as an artist with the Royal Academy of Arts. This work nevertheless displays his artistic virtuosity with a carefully planned composition where trees are used to establish scale and lighter and darker active and inactive areas locate the focal point or depict receding distances. Due to the rugged nature of his travels many of his works were recorded in pencil and watercolour and only years later transferred into oils.