South African National Gallery
Colonial-era art museum in a historic garden, home to Dutch, British and South African painting and sculpture.
This guide to the South African National Gallery in Cape Town starts in Company's Garden, planted three centuries ago by a free burgher named Hendrik Boom to grow cabbages and turnips for scurvy-stricken sailors rounding the Cape. It then turns to a painting hanging inside the gallery: an 1899 canvas by the English-born art teacher James Ford, imagining a future Cape Town skyline dressed for a Governor-General who did not yet exist, crowded with statesmen including Cecil Rhodes and Paul Kruger. Ford charged a shilling a head to view it, and tucked himself into a corner of the canvas, brush in hand.
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