Lot Essay
Baines sailed from Cape Town in February 1848 for Port Elizabeth, where he joined a wagon-train bound inland for Grahamstown (which would be his headquarters until 1853). At Grahamstown he joined Liddle's three-month travelling and hunting trip to the Orange River and the north-eastern parts of the Cape Colony, his first real expedition in South Africa. The present picture dates to this expedition and, like the large group of oils from the same trip now in the MuseuMAfricA, Johannesburg (R.F. Kennedy, Catalogue of Pictures in the Africana Museum, I, Johannesburg, 1966, nos. B106-B161), was painted from field sketches once back in Grahamstown. The MuseuMAfricA pictures include another oil of 'Kaffirs' crossing the same drift (B155).
The crossing is also recorded by Baines in his Journal: '[21 Jun.] Next morning, wishing to obtain sketches of the country and trusting that the wagons would overtake me, I started afoot and soon found subjects in abundance for my pencil ... and as I reached the Koonap, another company of Kaffirs ... were wading through the drift ... Stopping by the way to sketch the magnificent face of rock formerly mentioned, which could not have been less than two hundred feet in height ... I reached the Vyge Kraal Drift in the Fish River about dark, and stretched myself under a bush to wait the arrival of the wagons' (T. Baines, Journal of Residence in Africa 1842-1853, I, Cape Town, 1961, pp. 108-9).
The crossing is also recorded by Baines in his Journal: '[21 Jun.] Next morning, wishing to obtain sketches of the country and trusting that the wagons would overtake me, I started afoot and soon found subjects in abundance for my pencil ... and as I reached the Koonap, another company of Kaffirs ... were wading through the drift ... Stopping by the way to sketch the magnificent face of rock formerly mentioned, which could not have been less than two hundred feet in height ... I reached the Vyge Kraal Drift in the Fish River about dark, and stretched myself under a bush to wait the arrival of the wagons' (T. Baines, Journal of Residence in Africa 1842-1853, I, Cape Town, 1961, pp. 108-9).