Card players

This oil painting titled, Card players is by the South African artist Gregoire Boonzaier (1909-2005), painted in 1962. The painting is a rare work of Boonzaaier depicting people, rather than his signature landscapes or still-life subjects. During the 1960s, gambling was still a prohibited activity in South Africa, and stayed banned as late as the 1990s. Boonzaier loved to paint works of these “Illicit activities” as a conversation between the laws and reality of society. Short Biography: Gregoire Johannes Boonzaier was born in 1909 in Newlands, Cape Town. He studied at the Heatherley School of Art in London. Boonzaier was a highly vocal artist about the history of the Bo-Kaap and District Six in Cape Town and was against the Group Areas Act of the 1950s. Boonzaier is seen as the father of the Cape Impressionism, a local stylistic form related to the western Impressionism school. His artworks range from still life paintings, landscapes and portraits and he often contributed the struggle against apartheid in his subject matter prolifically as a founder of the New Group in 1938 with other South African artists such as Walter Battiss, Lippy Lipschitz, Freida Lock and Terence McCaw. Boonzaier passed away in 2005 in Cape Town.. The University of Pretoria has thirty of his renowned works in the art collection.n. This painting was purchased by the University of Pretoria from a solo exhibition by the artist on 3 September 1985.