Description
Robert Gwelo Goodman
South African 1871-1939
Robert Goodman was born in Taplow in Buckinghamshire in 1871. He moved with his family to the Cape in 1886 where he attended lessons with JS Morland, the first president of the South African Society of Artists. Goodman continued his training at the Académie Julian in Paris from 1895, before basing himself in London in 1897. He travelled frequently to India and back to South Africa occasionally, where he recorded scenes from the Anglo-Boer War front. He chose to adopt the name Gwelo in the hope of standing out in the London art scene and subsequently signed his work with his now famous ‘RGG’ monogram.
Goodman returned to Cape Town permanently in 1915 and produced a series of works focused on Cape Homesteads, of which the illustrations for Dorothea Fairbridge’s Historic Houses of South Africa.
Goodman is undoubtedly one of the country’s most accomplished painters, and a stand-out pastelist. Immersive and memorable paintings of Cape Dutch façades in dappled light, Drakensberg streams, quiet interiors and still lifes, all typically animated with short, flickering strokes of pure colour, mark out a prolific and impressive career.
