Helene Love-Allotey
Head of Department
Lot 45*
Thomas Baines(1820-1875)The Eastern Cataracts of the Victoria Falls
Amended
17 March 2021, 17:00 GMT
London, New Bond StreetSold for £574,750 inc. premium
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Thomas Baines (1820-1875)
The Eastern Cataracts of the Victoria Falls
signed and dated 'T Baines Dec 1869' (lower left), inscribed verso 'The Eastern cataracts of the VICTORIA FALLS ZAMBESI RIVER from GARDEN ISLAND/ sketched in 1862/ painted 1869/ At MANGWE RIVER MATABELI LAND/ Sth AFRICA/ T.BAINES/ for E. Mohr Esq./ care of E. Oliver Esq'
oil on canvas
49.5 x 63.5cm (19 1/2 x 25in).
signed and dated 'T Baines Dec 1869' (lower left), inscribed verso 'The Eastern cataracts of the VICTORIA FALLS ZAMBESI RIVER from GARDEN ISLAND/ sketched in 1862/ painted 1869/ At MANGWE RIVER MATABELI LAND/ Sth AFRICA/ T.BAINES/ for E. Mohr Esq./ care of E. Oliver Esq'
oil on canvas
49.5 x 63.5cm (19 1/2 x 25in).
Footnotes
Provenance
The collection of Eduard Mohr (1828-1876);
The collection of Major Aubrey Hilton of Harare;
Acquired by a private collector circa 1970;
By descent.
When introducing Baines's Northern Goldfields Diaries John Wallis comments:
"some of the oil paintings of these travels are known ... But the whereabouts of many of the canvases has not been traced ..."
(1946, p.xx).
Now one of these important and historic lost paintings has emerged from a private collection to make an emphatic contribution to Thomas Baines's landscape oeuvre.
Born into a family of mariners in King's Lynn, Norfolk, Baines served a five-year apprenticeship as an ornamental painter acquiring drawing and design skills. Instead of pursuing coach decorating professionally, he sailed to Cape Town and worked as a marine and portrait painter. He travelled throughout southern Africa before being appointed artist-storekeeper on Gregory's North-West Australian expedition (1855-57), and Livingstone's Zambesi expedition (1858-59). Fulfilling his artist role more enthusiastically than his storeman duties, Baines produced innumerable drawings including maps, and paintings. While this work relates to the expanding parameters of 19th century science, he claimed he was an artist 'working as much as possible in the actual presence of nature' (Victoria Falls portfolio, 1865, p.2).
When free to determine his subjects, Baines's paintings display excellent powers of observation, a retentive visual memory and sensuous responses to natural visual spectacles. Consequently, his experiences of the Zambesi River and Victoria Falls with James Chapman (1860-65) generated many accomplished, arresting landscapes, fascinating for their scientific content and information on British colonial enterprise. "The Eastern cataracts of the Victoria Falls" is one such painting, striking for its aesthetic qualities, dramatic rendition of landscape, portrayal of black and white men, and scientific curiosity about light manifested in the dominant double rainbow hovering over tumbling blue-white water and rising diaphanous spray.
The Baines and Chapman journals reveal the explorers' delight in rainbows amd Baines recounts on 5th August 1862:
"Here one may stand on the very edge as on a pier of solid masonry and look not only into the dim intricacies of the mist-hidden distances – spanned over by a rainbow, glorious in its brilliant loveliness and forming, but for the small segment cut out by the shadow of the rock he stands on, a perfect circle, surrounded by another with reversed colours, fainter and more indefinite as it approaches the thinner spaces in the mist; - but he may peer down into the very abyss beneath him."
Having lived under wide Norfolk skies in rainy England, Baines was familiar with double rainbows, a phenomenon produced by light refraction in spray droplets. Passing through droplets, light reverses the colour spectrum refracting or bending twice on the inside of each droplet before exiting. Red tops the primary bow but in the bow iteration, colours reverse with red at the bottom. Working from his reference portfolio of drawings and watercolours, Baines represented the double rainbow in many Falls landscapes. The Eastern cataracts oil painting suggests that a carefully observed watercolour of the Falls from Garden Island in Johannesburg's Brenthurst Library was a reference source but in the oil Baines does not reproduce the soft watercolour haziness of the rainbows' spectral colour. He heightens hues to convey the concept of light refraction, drawing attention to spectral wavelengths perceived by human eyes viewing transparent spray at close quarters.
Baines and Chapman reached the Zambesi in July 1862 after a very long trek through Namibia. They marvelled at the surging river, deep cliffs, and thunderous falling torrents generating spray clouds. Baines sketched the Falls in situ from many angles, extracting denotational graphic information on spatial forms and tones from a vast spatial vista. He painted detailed, confidently executed watercolours at the campsite, and wrote adjectivally profuse journal descriptions to enrich his visual memory. His oils were painted after leaving the Falls when he had time to work on canvas.
Artists' canvases may carry two forms of information – painted images on prepared surfaces and written data on the reverse. Baines's 1869 Eastern Falls Mosi-oa-Tunya annotated landscape is one of a number of representations of the dry 1862 winter season when two white Englishmen and several local Africans measured and viewed the Falls. Characteristically, Baines positions himself as eye/I witness on a rock promontory gazing at the falling Zambesi.
The back of the canvas conveys narrative information in Baines's handwriting:
'The Eastern cataracts of the VICTORIA FALLS ZAMBESI RIVER from GARDEN ISLAND sketched in 1862 painted 1869 At MANGWE RIVER MATABELI LAND Sth AFRICA T.BAINES for E. Mohr Esq. case of E. Oliver Esq.'
These statements invite questions: Why was Baines painting at Mangwe River in 1869? Who are E. Mohr and E. Oliver, and why is the painting being sent to Mohr in Oliver's wagon?
Eduard Mohr (1828-1876), a wealthy German trader, ship owner, and explorer visited Natal in 1866. On a second trip in early 1869 he met Karl Mauch, who had discovered gold north of the Limpopo and Friedrich Adolph Huebner, a mining engineer who joined him on an expedition. Mohr met Thomas Baines in November 1868 when they embarked from London on the Asia to sail to Natal and in 1869 he renewed his acquaintance with Baines. Both men were heading north, Mohr to the goldfields and Victoria Falls, while Baines was leading an expedition to Matabeleland on behalf of the South African Gold Fields Exploration Company. The men outspanned next to each other in Pietermaritzburg, met again by the Tugela river, and Baines outspanned next to the German wagons in Potchefstroom. Baines and Mohr shared interests in zoology, astronomy and cartography; in Potchefstroom they worked together taking longitudinal readings. Importantly, Mohr commissioned Baines to produce scenes to illustrate his travels (Northern Goldfields Diaries, v.1, p.3). Baines immediately painted the Potchefstroom encampment and explains contractual details in his diary.
Mohr and Baines spent more time together at Lee's farm at Mangwe river near the Tati goldfields. Mohr commissioned additional paintings from Baines, including the Pietermaritzburg encampment scene, which Baines painted in 1870 (Carruthers and Arnold, 1995, Ch. 11, figure 7). Mohr left for the Victoria Falls on November 26 and on Monday 29 Baines noted: "Commenced a picture of the Victoria Falls for Mr. Mohr', presumably the Eastern cataracts canvas (Diary, v. 1, p.231).
On 12 December Mohr, unable to proceed on his journey owing to heavy rains, arrived back at Mangwe. Two days later Baines wrote that Mohr had offered to extend his commission 'so as to make it in all £100' (Diary, v. 1, p.235). Clearly Mohr was an important patron and friend.
Baines's diary entry for 14 December (p.236) describes his preliminary sketch for the Pietermaritzburg encampment painting and continues, 'I also succeeded in completing the picture of the Victoria Falls for Mr Mohr, but in painting the double rainbow, although I was tolerably certain of the order of the colours, I wished for a little confirmation...'. Unable to find the information in his books on scientific subjects, he comments, 'Watson made a rainbow by filling his mouth with water and spirting it out and decided that the blue ought to be inside the circle and the red out. Of course, in the outer or complementary rainbow the colours are reversed, the red being inside and the blue out' (Diary, v. 1, p.236).
The information on the reverse of the Eastern cataracts painting confirms that it is being despatched in Oliver's wagons for Mohr to collect on his return to Durban. Edwin Oliver was the London secretary of the South African Gold Fields Exploration Company, which was to repudiate its debts, leaving Baines to pay them off. Mohr reached the Falls in 1870. He wrote To the Victoria Falls of the Zambezi (1875), published in English in 1876, the year of his suicide while suffering depression on an Angolan expedition.
Examples of Thomas Baines' work are held collections at the Natural History Museum, Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, National Geographical Society and some provincial UK museums. These holdings define Baines as a Victorian illustrator depicting landscapes, plants, people and artefacts while travelling in Australia and Southern Africa where his work is in many public and private collections.
We are grateful to Dr Marion Arnold of Loughborough University for her compilation of the above footnote.
Bibliography
Baines, Thomas, The Northern Goldfields Diaries of Thomas Baines (edited by J.P.R Wallis). Volume One 1869-1870 (London, Chatto and Windus, 1946)
Baines, Thomas, The Victoria Falls, Zambesi River sketched on the spot during the Journey of J. Chapman and T. Baines (portfolio), (London, Day & Son, 1865; reprint Bulawayo, Books of Rhodesia, 1969)
Carruthers, Jane & Arnold, Marion, The Life and Work of Thomas Baines. (Vlaeberg, Fernwood Press, South Africa, 1995)
Mohr, Eduard, To the Victoria Falls of the Zambesi, 1876; reprint Bulawayo, Books of Rhodesia, 1973)
Stevenson, Michael (ed.) Thomas Baines: An Artist in the Service of Science in Southern Africa. (London, Christie's, 1999)
Wallis, J.P.R. Thomas Baines. His life and explorations in South Africa, Rhodesia and Australia first published 1941 (with captions and a new introduction by F.R. Bradlow) (Cape Town, A.A.Balkema, 1976)
IMAGE CREDIT
'East end of the falls of the Zambesi, 1862', image courtesy of The Brenthurst Library, Johannesburg.
Saleroom notices
Provenance: Eduard Mohr (1828-1876); Dr Aschenborn; Major Aubrey Hilton of Harare; Mrs Catherine Gelletich, her sale at Stephen Welz & Co, 11th October 1972, lot 12. Acquired by a private collector; By descent.
