Robert Gwelo GOODMAN (1871 – 1939)

BIOGRAPHY

Robert Goodman was born in Taplow in Buckinghamshire. 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. With Morland’s financial help, Goodman continued his training at the Académie Julian in Paris from 1895, before basing himself in London in 1897.

During this period, he travelled frequently, including to India and back to South Africa, where he recorded scenes from the front of the Anglo-Boer War (South African War). 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 ‘RGG’ monogram.

In 1915, Goodman returned to Cape Town permanently and produced a series of works focused on Cape Homesteads, of which the illustrations for Dorothea Fairbridge’s Historic Houses of South Africa, published in 1922, were only a small part. Goodman’s interest in Cape vernacular architecture and his work alongside Ivan Mitford-Barberton enabled him to play a major role in the so-called Cape Dutch Revival in South Africa, and many of his renovations, adaptations and designs had a lasting impact.

He was a stand-out pastellist who produced immersive 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.

SOURCE
‘Robert Gwelo Goodman,’ Strauss&co, https://www.straussart.co.za/artists/robert-gwelo-goodman.