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Lot Essay
William Edward Oates left England in March 1873 with his brother Frank on the S.S. African for a hunting trip in South Africa. They set off from Durban in April travelling to (Pieter) Maritzburg and across the Limpopo into Matabeleland, returning to Durban the following January. An account of this early expedition into what would become Bechuanaland and Rhodesia (now Botswana and Zimbabwe) based largely on Frank Oates's journals and letters, was published in 1881.
The present view was painted on the return journey when the expedition visited Pretoria on 2-4 December 1873. Oates depicts the eastern side of the town, looking over the Apies River down Church Street East to Church Square. The white church is the Dutch Reformed Church which stood in the centre of the square at the time. The original church was consecrated in 1857, was later rebuilt and enlarged and finally demolished in 1905, and with it disappeared the picturesque scenes when ox-wagons were outspanned and tents pitched round the church on the occasion of the quarterly communion services ("Nagmaal").
William Edward Oates, F.R.G.S., returned to Africa in 1876 to hunt in Zululand (the northern part of present day Kwazulu-Natal) and travelled in Portuguese East Africa, India and America. He died of typhoid on holiday with his family in Madeira in 1896. He was the father of the famous Antarctic explorer Captain L.G. Oates.
The version engraved in his brother's account of the expedition was donated by the Oates family to the Cultural History Museum, Pretoria.
The present view was painted on the return journey when the expedition visited Pretoria on 2-4 December 1873. Oates depicts the eastern side of the town, looking over the Apies River down Church Street East to Church Square. The white church is the Dutch Reformed Church which stood in the centre of the square at the time. The original church was consecrated in 1857, was later rebuilt and enlarged and finally demolished in 1905, and with it disappeared the picturesque scenes when ox-wagons were outspanned and tents pitched round the church on the occasion of the quarterly communion services ("Nagmaal").
William Edward Oates, F.R.G.S., returned to Africa in 1876 to hunt in Zululand (the northern part of present day Kwazulu-Natal) and travelled in Portuguese East Africa, India and America. He died of typhoid on holiday with his family in Madeira in 1896. He was the father of the famous Antarctic explorer Captain L.G. Oates.
The version engraved in his brother's account of the expedition was donated by the Oates family to the Cultural History Museum, Pretoria.