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The production and exhibition of replicas of archaeological material were a very significant and serious enterprise by museums in the late nineteenth-century Europe. Replicas included plaster casts, watercolour copies, brass rubbings, paper mosaics, and from the 1850s onwards, photographs. Their creation was very much a part of the colonial worldview focusing on exhibiting the exotic. The Rock Art Department at the National Museum, Bloemfontein has several watercolour reproductions of San rock art dating to that period.

The watercolours were made by Charles Sirr Orpen (29 April 1826 ─ 4 August 1887), who was born in Dublin, Ireland, and emigrated to South Africa in 1844. He began his life in South Africa as a farmer on Taai Bosch Fontein Farm near De Aar. He later moved to Smithfield in the then Orange Free State, where he practiced law and was the church warden for the Church of England. His interest in geology, fossil collecting and archaeology was sparked after he accompanied the Scottish hunter Roualeyn George Gordon-Cumming on an expedition to the Limpopo Valley in 1848 (Gordon-Cumming 1875). Orpen’s passion for archaeology and anthropology was shared with his younger brother, the surveyor, politician, magistrate and eminent rock art enthusiast, Joseph Millerd Orpen.

Inspired by his brother and close friend George William Stow, C.S. Orpen began making watercolour and charcoal reproductions of San rock art in the Orange Free State. Stow was an influential writer concerned with the lives of indigenous people of southern Africa. His famous work, The Native Races of South Africa, contained notes from Orpen’s travels. Stow felt “indebted to the zealous co-operation of Mr. Charles Sirr Orpen … due to his untiring energy” (Stow 1905: x). Orpen and Stow conducted one of the first archaeological excavations in a rock shelter near Smithfield, where they unearthed important artefacts such as stone tools, animal bones, ostrich egg shell fragments, freshwater shells, bone tools, pottery fragments, an iron shaft of an assegai and the stem of a clay pipe. The success of the excavation prompted Orpen to continue this endeavour in several sites near the towns of Wepener, Rouxville, Ladybrand and Smithfield. Orpen accumulated an extensive collection of archaeological and ethnological artefacts, geological specimens and fossils.

When the National Museum of the Orange Free State was established, on 20 July 1877, Orpen enthusiastically offered to donate his collection for exhibition and research. Orpen and Stow were elected as ‘corresponding members’ of the museum committee and advocated for the committee to actively source artefacts for museum exhibitions (Coetzer 1989). According to the museum’s specimen catalogue, Orpen donated a collection of stone arrow heads and flakes from Smithfield, a copy of San paintings and a weighted digging stick in August 1877 (Hoffman 1958). The bulk of his collection was held at the Scottish Masonic Lodge in Smithfield and was eventually moved to the museum in 1879. These archaeological items are currently part of the Archaeology and Anthropology Department’s collections.

The Rock Art Department has seven watercolour reproductions of San rock art, painted by Orpen between 1877 and 1879. Orpen made these reproductions to assist him in investigating the meaning of San rock art, much the same way as archaeologists take photographs and make tracings of the art today. Some of the watercolours have notes indicating important features of the rock face (Fig. 1). This is still a technique we use to this day.

The watercolours became the property of the museum in 1879 and were moved to the Rock Art Department in 1989. In 2005, the watercolours were mounted on back boards by technicians at Oliewenhuis Art Museum and kept according to the ICOMS environmental standards. In 2008, the collection was digitised by the Ringing Rocks Laboratory, Rock Art Research Institute, Wits University, and can be viewed on the African Rock Art Digital Archive website (www.sarada.co.za). The watercolours show signs of deterioration, most notable are the damages by silverfish (Fig. 3). The effect of the ultraviolet radiation is minimal since the paintings have never been exhibited, but there is evidence of the pigment fading and paper discolouration (Fig. 5).

A comparison of Orpen’s reproduction (Fig. 5) with the original image (Fig. 6) demonstrates the significant difference between the San and colonial worldviews. Orpen only reproduced images that were familiar to him, such as guns, men in uniforms, gunpowder horns and horses. He omitted the pride of lions, some with fantastically bristly manes. Orpen’s reproduction is misleading in suggesting that the original rock art is merely a painting of European soldiers, whereas the actual artwork has a deeper meaning. The soldiers are depicted in the “hands on the hip” stance, which is universally recognised as the possessive-aggressive posture (Eibl-Eibestfeldt 1989). This representation of European men was common during the contact period in South Arican history and can be seen in San, Korana and Northern Sotho rock art (Ouzman 2005; Moodley 2017). The San believed that lions were associated with malice and that malevolent spiritual healers transformed into lions and visited different camps to cause harm to people (Marshall 1999). By juxtaposing the European soldiers and the lions, the San artist was conveying the impending threat of the invasion. Both the soldiers and lions were seen as evil entities that endangered the San people.

Orpen’s reproductions were intended for scientific investigation and as a record of the past but have now themselves become valuable artefacts that entered many museum collections throughout South Africa. These replicas are important pictorial biographies of both the original San artists and Orpen himself. Their value as a reflection of different cultural perceptions during colonial times is immeasurable.

References
Coetzer, A.C.M. 1989. Geskiendenis van die Nasionale Museum, 1877-1911. Navorsinge van die Nasionale Museum Bloemfontein 6(8): 244-291.
Eibl-Eibesfeldt, I. 1989. Human ethology. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.
Gordon-Cumming, R.G. 1875. Five years of a hunter’s life in the far interior of South Africa. New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers.
Hoffman, A.C. 1958. Interesting aspects about the early history of the National Museum in Bloemfontein. South African Museums Association Bulletin 6: 332-336.
Marshall, L. 1999. Nyae Nyae !Kung: Beliefs and rites. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Moodley, S. 2017. Soldiers of the koma. Indago 33: 13-27. https://nationalmuseumpublications.co.za/soldiers-of-the-koma
Ouzman, S. 2005. The magical arts of a raider nation: Central South Africa’s Korana rock art. South African Archaeological Society Goodwin Series 9: 101-113. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3858038
Stow, G.W. 1905. The native races of South Africa. London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co. Ltd. https://archive.org/details/nativeracesofsou00stow

List of Figures

Figure 1: C.S. Orpen copy with notes
Figure 2: A photograph of the rock art site copied in Figure 1 (Xhariep District in the Free State Province).
Figure 3: C.S. Orpen copy with silverfish damage to the edges of the painting.
Figure 4: A photograph of the rock art site copied in Figure 3 (Xhariep District in the Free State Province).
Figure 5: C.S. Orpen copy of San paintings (Xhariep District in the Free State Province).
Figure 6. A photograph of the rock art site copied in Figure 5 (Xhariep District in the Free State Province).

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