Gerard Bhengu
Like Hezekiel Ntuli (qv.), Gerard Bhengu’s remarkable skill attracted much attention from a largely white patronage, and he too, despite the support of some of these patrons, was ultimately prevented from embarking on a formal art training for fear that it would spoil and corrupt his ‘natural’ gift. Bhengu’s talent as a portraitist and landscape painter was not without admirers in black intellectual circles. One of the well-known Dhlomo brothers, presumably Herbert, railed against such white paternalism as follows: ‘fine work shows that many a lovely flower of African genius is left to blush away its sweetness in obscurity through lack of training’.1 Read More…
