Maggie Laubser

Maria Magdalena "Maggie" Laubser was born on 14 April 1886 on the farm Bloublommetjieskloof in the Malmesbury district of the Cape Colony, now the Western Cape. She attended the Rocklands farm school before boarding at Bloemhof Seminary in Stellenbosch from 1897 to 1901, where she received her first drawing instruction. After brief singing lessons in Cape Town, she studied painting for about two months under Professor Edward Roworth in 1903.

In October 1913 she traveled to the Netherlands with her sister, spending time at the artists' colony in Laren before enrolling at the Slade School of Fine Art, University of London, where she studied drawing under Henry Tonks, Walter Westley Russell, and Ambrose McEvoy, and painting under Philip Wilson Steer, from 1915 to 1918. No source records her taking a degree there. She returned to South Africa in 1919 and went to Germany in 1922, where she studied and painted in Berlin under Prof. Jachels and absorbed the influence of German Expressionism, a style she carried back into her depictions of the Cape.

Laubser settled at "Altyd Lig" in Strand in the mid-1940s and continued to paint there for the rest of her life. The South African Academy for Arts and Science awarded her its Medal of Honour for Painting in 1946, elected her a member in 1948, and made her an honorary member in 1959; the South African Association of Arts gave her a further Medal of Honour in 1968. She died on 17 May 1973 at her home in Strand, having painted almost to the end, and bequeathed roughly 140 works to Stellenbosch University.

Laubser's early work met sharp hostility. Writing in the Cape Town press in 1931 and 1932, the critic Bernard Lewis was sharply dismissive of her paintings, part of a broader wave of public ridicule directed at her early exhibitions. That reception reversed over the following decades: she was included in the 1937 Commonwealth exhibition in London, the 1948 South African Art survey at the Tate Gallery, and a South African showing at the Venice Biennale in 1954. Retrospectives at the Egon Guenther Gallery in 1963 and, in 1969, jointly at the South African National Gallery, the Pretoria Art Museum, and the Johannesburg Art Gallery confirmed her place in the national canon. A 2023 exhibition at the Norval Foundation, Portraits and the Landscape, revisited her portrait work and reaffirmed her standing as a founding figure of South African Expressionism.

Laubser's best-documented auction result is Flamingos on the Beach, reported to have sold for ZAR 2,670,400 at Strauss & Co in Johannesburg on 8 November 2010; this figure comes from secondary market commentary rather than a directly verified lot record, and independent research could not confirm it as her all-time auction record, so it should be treated as an indicative data point rather than a confirmed figure. Her market is overwhelmingly South African and channels through Strauss & Co and Aspire Art Auctions rather than international houses. Prices for Laubser sit well below those of her contemporary Irma Stern, and results are thin enough that any single sale should be read in the context of a small, domestically concentrated market rather than as a broad trend line.

No catalogue raisonne exists for Laubser, and her authentication rests on museum holdings, her bequest to Stellenbosch University, and the records of the South African auction houses that handle most of her market. Because her auction activity is concentrated domestically and individual results, including her reported auction high, could not be independently verified against primary sale documentation, collectors should treat any single reported price with caution and confirm current figures directly with Strauss & Co or Aspire Art Auctions before relying on them.