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Everard, Bertha

Bertha Everard was born in Durban, South Africa 1873 - 1965

 

Always restless and fiercely independent, the spirited Bertha was determined to raise her children according to her own non-conformist principles and insisted that they would not attend formal schooling. Their education would often include accompanying their mother on lengthy (sometimes weeks long) painting excursions into unexplored terrain by ox wagon. They would later be joined on these artistic "safari" adventures by their beloved aunt Edith who had become by then the headmistress of Eunice School in Bloemfontein

 

Bertha's powerful works painted on these trips capture the solitude and mystery of the African veld, accentuating the overwhelming enormity of the environment. They are brooding, poignant landscapes usually captured at dusk as the strong African light sinks and fades, casting its glow on the still warm, golden, dry hills and veld. Some show dusty ribbons of road or slow, snaking rivers leading the viewer, as though a traveller, through remote hills and gloomy valleys into the twilight.

 

Art Education
- 1888 – 1890 Bertha Everard trained as a concert-pianist in Vienna, where    she first started painting seriously.
- 1891 Bertha Everard studied art under Sir Hubert Herkomer at Bushey.
- 1893 Bertha Everard studied art at Slade and Westminister Schools,      

  London, under Mouat; St Ives School of Landscape, Cornwall.
- 1925 – 1926 Studied art informally in Paris.

 

Short Artist Biography
- Educated in England;
- 1891 – 1901 Bertha Everard showed a talent for portraiture while studying

  in London, but concentrated on landscape painting from the time she

  worked in Cornwall; taught art at Walthamstow Hall, Sevenoaks, Kent;  

  several works hung on the line at Royal Academies - Wild Parsley bought

  for Wednesbury Permanent Gallery (since resold).
- 1902 Bertha Everard returned to South Africa with Milner Teachers

   following the Anglo-Boer War; taught at Pretoria High School for Girls.
- 1903 Married CJ Everard, with whom she subsequently settled on the

   farm ‘Bonnefoi’, in the Carolina district of the Eastern Transvaal.
- 1910 The ‘Star’, 25 March 1910, hails “the discovery of a new South

  African painter” when Bertha Everard won the Gold Medal for an oil

  landscape, Mid-Winter on the Komati River (Peace of Winter), at the

  South African National Union art exhibition organized in Johannesburg by

  Florence Phillips.
- 1917 Elected a member of South African Society of Artists.
- 1922 – 1926 Bertha Everard took her family to Europe to study; lived in

   England and in Paris, during which time she painted actively, exhibited

  on the Paris Salon and was influenced by post-Impressionist styles.
- 1926 Bertha Everard returned to South Africa and a life of painting on the

  farm; painted exclusively in oils. Four of her paintings, Peace of Winter in

  the Johannesburg Art Gallery; Moonrise, Transvaal; On The Banks of the

  Komati; and Delville Wood, in the Pretoria Art Museum, were reproduced

  by the Medici Society. Peace of Winter was subsequently republished by

  E Schweikerdt, Pretoria.

 

Art Exhibitions
- Bertha Everard exhibited on the Royal Academy prior to 1902 and again

  in 1911 and 1923;
- 1910 SANU Exhibition of Arts and Grafts, Wanderers’ Club,

  Johannesburg. Exhibited on annual exhibitions of South Africa Provincial

  Art Societies.
- 1916 First one-man exhibition, Bloemfontein.
- 1924 South African Section, British Empire Exhibition, Wembley; Paris

  Salon.
- 1926 Paris Salon.
- 1936 Empire Exhibition, Johannesburg;
- 1952 Van Riebeeck Tercent Exhibition, Cape Town. Various exhibitions

  of the Everard Group during her life-time.
- 1967 Prestige Retrospective exhibition – ‘The Everard Group’, Pretoria    

  Art Museum.

 

Public Art collections
- South African National Art Gallery, Cape Town; Johannesburg Art

 Gallery; Pretoria Art Museum; Durban Art Gallery; Tatham Art Gallery,

 Pietermaritzburg; Libertas; William Humphreys Art Gallery, Kimberley;  National Museum, Bloemfontein; Libertas, Pretoria; Rand Mines,

 Johannesburg; South African House, London.

 

Source
Berman, E. 1994. Art & Artists of South Africa . Southern Book Publishers.

 

Ref:  http://www.everard-group.com/pageBertha.htm

 

Everard Group Artists

http://www.everard-group.com/page3.htm

 

The Everard Group is a family of renowned South African Artists, spanning four generations over a period of more than 100 years, in a remote corner of the African highveld in the early 1900's, and continues to this day.

 

The works of the Everards hang in all major South African National Art Galleries including Cape Town, Johannesburg, Pretoria, Durban, Pietermaritzburg, Port Elizabeth, East London, Bloemfontein and Kimberley, as well as collections abroad including Africa House in London.

 

The group originally consisted of 4 members, beginning with Bertha Everard, her sister Edith King and her two daughters Ruth and Rosamund. It continued to grow to the next immediate generation with Ruth's daughter Leonora Everard haden, and Leonora's daughter Nichola Leigh. Leonora along with her daughter continue to produce work to the present day.

Bertha and Edith arrived in South Africa, from England, at the turn of the last century, where they settled on the farm called Bonnefoi, which lies on the escarpment in Mpumalanga, where the highveld drops into steep valleys and gorges to the lowveld. This inspired their great interest and love of the African Landscape which continues to influence the artists today

 

A Brief History

Edith and Bertha King were born in South Africa during the Anglo/Zulu wars, the daughters of an impetuous and hot-headed captain in the British army; they were raised by their mother and educated in England. 

 

At the turn of the century, they returned to South Africa as schoolteachers.  By 1905, Bertha had married Charles Everard, a well-respected owner of a lively and busy trading store on the transport wagon route to Lydenberg in the old Transvaal province.

 

On the farm Bonnefoi in the remote, bleak and vast expanses of the Eastern Highveld escarpment overlooking the Komati valley, Bertha supervised the design and construction of a large, stately and dignified home.  The baronial sized rooms displayed a strong influence of the British Arts and Crafts movement and were filled with furniture inspired by William Morris design.  Here she raised her three children Ruth, Rosamund and Sebastian Everard.  In later years the décor of the home would stretch to encompass the varied interests and tastes of the talented family and an exotic amalgamation of hunting trophies, African artefacts and Rosamund’s collection of North African and Egyptian treasures predominated.

Daily life on a South African farm in the early years of the twentieth century was very different to life in England and presented many difficulties to the educated, cultured and artistic Bertha. The rural community around her, African farm workers and local Boer farmers together with their families, did not share her European background and education, often causing her to feel culturally restricted and alienated. Despite her frustration and regular bouts of depression, Bertha's pioneering spirit enabled her to educate her children herself, supervise the working of the farmlands (a difficult task for a woman at the time), design and oversee the building of schools and churches for the African farm workers and their families - including a church for the local Anglican congregation in Carolina- and to create an artistic legacy as a pioneer of South African Modernism in painting.

 

What was extraordinary about the Everard Group artists was their ability to produce powerful, innovative work on an isolated farm, far removed from the hub of urban centres. Despite the negative criticism they received from a conservative public, unwilling to accept modern styles, the Everard artists continued to work with courage and conviction. Their pioneering work exists as a legacy to the development of modern art in South Africa.

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