Cecil Higgs – Close Up

Description

Cecil Higgs: Close Up is a revealing and intimate biography of one of South Africa’s most respected painters. It is a warm and human, yet at the same time candid, portrait of Cecil Higgs, the private person and the public painter.

Based on hitherto unpublished sources – her extant diaries, notebooks and inimitable drafts to close friends and contemporary fellow artists, and their letters to her – this unique archival material is a virtual kaleidoscope of South African history over the past hundred years.

Cecil Higgs spent her childhood on a post-Boer War Free State farm and her penultimate school years in Grahamstown, then London and Paris in the 1920s as an art student. She returned home in 1933 and in the five ensuing decades established herself as one of our country’s leading painters. A modest and unassuming person, she had an indomitable will and courage, and a passion for nature’s elements that is reflected vibrantly in her work.

Dieter Bertram was born and bred in Cape Town. His peripatetic career has spanned script-writing, copy-writing and art and travel writing, as well as antiquarian book-dealing. He is a life member of Van Plettenberg Historical Society; Friends of the SA National Gallery, and of the Simon van der Stel Foundation. Bertram became a lifelong friend of Cecil Higgs whom he met in 1954 and who, in turn, became a constant source of inspiration.