NEDBANK 

ART SUITE

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HERE, THERE & FORWARD

Farm Home

Robert Gwelo Goodman

1871 – 1939

Artwork Details

Artist          Robert Gwelo Goodman 
Title            Farm Home
Medium      Acrylic on canvas (60 x 90cm)

About the Artist

Robert Gwelo Goodman (1871–1939) was an English-born South African painter and architectural designer, born in Taplow, Buckinghamshire. He moved to the Cape with his family in 1886, took evening art classes with JS Morland, and trained at the Académie Julian in Paris from 1895. After working in Britain and travelling in India and South Africa, he settled permanently in Cape Town in 1915. Goodman became known for landscapes, Cape Dutch architecture, interiors and flower studies. He received a gold medal for pastel drawings at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco.

About this Artwork

One of the most interesting aspects of Farm Home is how different it is from the still-life paintings for which Goodman is perhaps best-known today. Goodman's still lifes are typically highly structured and intimate. They focus on carefully arranged objects such as flowers, fruit, ceramics, glassware and domestic artefacts. By contrast, Farm Home is expansive and atmospheric. Rather than examining a small collection of objects, Goodman turns his attention to the broader landscape and the experience of ‘open space’. The emphasis shifts from composition as arrangement to composition as environment. The buildings, trees and pathways are less important as individual subjects than as components of a larger farm scene. Here, the artist is concerned with distance and light.

Despite these differences, the same artistic sensibility is evident in both genres. Whether painting a vase of flowers or a homestead, Goodman demonstrates an exceptional sensitivity to tonal relationships and atmosphere. While Goodman's still lifes often communicate refinement and domesticity, and have long been a common feature in corporate collections, Farm Home reflects a broader South African landscape tradition that became highly prevalent in corporate collections throughout the twentieth century.