Alfred Aaron de Pass (2 July 1861 – 17 December 1952) was a South African businessman, art-collector and philanthropist. [1]
De Pass was born in Cape Town into a prominent family of Sephardic Jewish merchants from London. Their original surname, Shalom, was translated to the Spanish word for peace and became Paz before being anglicised to Pass in England. [2] He was descended from Elias de Paz, who was among the original 12 Jewish brokers admitted to the privileges of the Royal Exchange in 1697. His father, Daniel de Pass (1838–1921), followed his own father and uncle to the Cape Colony, where the family were the largest ship owners in Cape Town and controlled a vast guano enterprise. [1] [3]
In 1867, Alfred de Pass was taken to England. He was educated in Ramsgate, in Gothenburg, and at the Royal School of Mines. He lived in the Colony of Natal in 1879–84, where he introduced a valuable strain of sugar that was disease-resistant. [1]
He spent a considerable amount of his personal fortune on buying works of art, many of which he generously gave to several galleries and museums, specially at Falmouth, Bristol, Cambridge, Plymouth and Truro, as well as to the National Portrait Gallery, the British Museum and to Cape Town. He had a special relationship with Falmouth, regarding it as his home. This town received much of his art donations, which now constitute the core of the Falmouth Art Gallery. [4] He also purchased a large number of British and international works for the collection of the National Gallery of South Africa, now known as Iziko. [5] He was married to Ethel Phoebe De Pass, née Salaman (1869–1910).
Brett Murray is a South African artist mostly known for his steel and mixed media wall sculptures. He was born in Pretoria, South Africa. Murray has a master's degree in fine art from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, 1989. Referred to by critic Brenda Atkinson as "the dark prince of South African pop (art)", Murray is one of the country's most popular artists, often using easily recognisable media images with the addition of a subversive and bitterly funny twist. Murray's work addresses the wars of the cultures, the clash between Afrocentrism and Eurocentrism, the old and the new South Africas. "With my work I hope to critically entertain. Through satirical and tragic reflections on South Africa, I hope to shift people's perspectives and change people's minds, indulgent, arrogant and pretentious as this might sound," he says. More recently, his work has explored his own personal experiences and identity. Murray was also the founder of the sculpture department at Stellenbosch University.
The Iziko South African National Gallery is the national art gallery of South Africa located in Cape Town. It became part of the Iziko collection of museums – as managed by the Department of Arts and Culture – in 2001. It then became an agency of the Department of Arts and Culture. Its collection consists largely of Dutch, French and British works from the 17th to the 19th century. This includes lithographs, etchings and some early 20th-century British paintings. Contemporary art work displayed in the gallery is selected from many of South Africa's communities and the gallery houses an authoritative collection of sculpture and beadwork.
The McGregor Museum in Kimberley, South Africa, originally known as the Alexander McGregor Memorial Museum, is a multidisciplinary museum which serves Kimberley and the Northern Cape, established in 1907.
Willie Bester is a South African painter, sculptor and collage artist. He is best known for his role in the protesting of the apartheid system through his artwork. He currently lives in Kuilsrivier, South Africa with his wife, Evelyn and their three children.
The Iziko South African Museum is a South African national museum located in Cape Town. The museum was founded in 1825, the first in the country. It has been on its present site in the Company's Garden since 1897. The museum houses important African zoology, palaeontology and archaeology collections.
Irma Stern was a major South African artist who achieved national and international recognition in her lifetime.
Tyrone Appollis is a South African artist and poet.
Falmouth Art Gallery is a publicly funded art gallery in Cornwall, with one of the leading art collections in Cornwall and southwest England, which features work by old masters, major Victorian artists, British and French Impressionists, leading surrealists and maritime artists, children's book illustrators, automata, contemporary painters and printmakers. It is located on The Moor, on the upper floor of the Municipal Buildings above the Library in Falmouth, Cornwall.
Matthew Hindley is a South African painter. He graduated from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, Cape Town in 2002, where he was awarded the Michaelis Prize.
The Company's Garden is the oldest garden in South Africa, a park and heritage site located in central Cape Town. The garden was originally created in the 1650s by the region's first European settlers and provided fertile ground to grow fresh produce to replenish ships rounding the Cape. It is watered from the Molteno Dam, which uses water from the springs on the lower slopes of Table Mountain.
Jan Vermeiren lives and works in South Africa as a painter and printmaker.
Walter Edward Westbrook was a South African artist who lived latterly in Kent, England. He was well known particularly for his watercolour landscapes inspired by the arid plains of the Northern Cape and Namibia, and later by the countryside of Kent and the English Channel. Westbrook was born in Pretoria in 1921 and lived in Kimberley for several decades before emigrating to England in the late 1990s. He died in Kent in 2015, aged 93.
Charles Ernest Peers was a South African artist.
The Iziko Museums of Cape Town — an amalgamation of 12 national museums located near the Cape Town city centre. Iziko museums spheres – natural history, social history and arts.
Penny Siopis is a South African artist from Cape Town. She was born in Vryburg in the North West province from Greek parents who had moved after inheriting a bakery from Siopis maternal grandfather. Siopis studied Fine Arts at Rhodes University in Makhanda, completing her master's degree in 1976, after which she pursued postgraduate studies at Portsmouth Polytechnic in the United Kingdom. She taught Fine Arts at the Technikon Natal in Durban from 1980 to 1983. In 1984 she took up a lectureship at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. During this time she was also visiting research fellow at the University of Leeds (1992–93) and visiting professor in fine arts at Umeå University in Sweden (2000) as part of an interinstitutional exchange. With an honorary doctorate from Rhodes University, Makhanda – Siopis is currently honorary professor at Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town.
Moses Tladi (1903–1959) was a self-taught artist who was the first black painter to have had a formal exhibition in South Africa and the first black artist to exhibit at the South African National Gallery.
Zelda Nolte (1929–2003) was a South African- British sculptor and woodblock printmaker.
Nerine Desmond (1908-1993) was a South African artist known particularly for her watercolour and oil paintings, especially landscapes, seascapes, portraits, Basuto horsemen, and pastoral scenes showing cattle herders and goat herders with their animals.
Kagiso Patrick "Pat" Mautloa is a multi-media visual artist based in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Robert A. Hamblin is a South African-born visual artist, working mainly in photography and paint on paper. The work deals with tensions on the gender and sexuality spectrums of the contemporary human condition. InterseXion, a multidisciplinary exhibition and seven year collaboration with the Sistaaz Hood, a group of South African transgender sex workers, was staged at Iziko South African National Gallery in 2017. His autobiography was published in June 2021.