Brilliant, talented, successful, and unknown

Stanley – Thursday

 

There must be tens of thousands of people whom the title of the blog describes. When I read about Charles Davidson Bell in an article by Don Pinnock in the Daily Maverick recently, I realised I knew some of what he did, but nothing about him, not even his name.

I probably hadn’t even become a teenager when I started coveting a product of his artistic ability. 

From my early years, I had been a stamp collector. Most collectors around the world, and probably all in South Africa, know about the Cape Triangular stamps issued on September 1, 1853. They were the first adhesive stamps from Africa and the first triangular stamps anywhere. Here they are: the penny brick-red and the fourpenny blue, and I desperately wanted a copy of each for my collection. It was only years later that my craving was satisfied by a gift from my parents.

 

 

Apparently the motivation to print triangular stamps was to make it easier for illiterate letter sorters to differentiate between incoming letters (rectangular stamps) from outgoing ones (triangular stamps). It is interesting to note that Wikipedia’s article on the stamps doesn’t mention the designer, who was, of course, Charles Bell. At the time, Bell was Surveyor-General of the Cape Colony and acknowledged the colony by having the reclining figure of Hope as the centrepiece of the design.

 

In today’s language, Bell would be labelled a polymath – outstanding at whatever he turned his attention to. As Pinnock writes:

Even among skilled Victorians, however, he was extraordinary. Born in 1813 and a product of St Andrews University in Scotland, his insatiable inquisitiveness led him first to cartooning and art, then exploration, land surveying, cartography, lithography, photography, meteorology, archaeology, palaeontology, philately, heraldry and numismatics (the study of coins and medals).

He designed stamps, medals, silverware, banknotes, carved wooden plaques, heraldry, book covers, stained-glass windows. He illuminated books, made ceremonial trowels and spades, engraved wood and brass, collected traditional Scottish ballads and Celtic harps. He even invented a tarred sailing catamaran — which nearly cost him his life when it capsized off Sea Point.

However, I never knew any of this as I grew up. What I was familiar with were some of the pictures he painted as he travelled around Southern Africa. These two, in particular, I've known since I was a kid.

The first White settlers under Jan van Riebeeck meet the locals, 1652.

The Voortrekkers run into people who want to keep their land, 1837

Here are some others:

Bushmen hunting

Cape Malay traders in Cape Town

A meeting of leaders of a Black tribe.

And here is the man himself.

Charles Davidson Bell

So, why isn't Bell better known?

Several reasons have been put forward. 

• His house in Cape Town burnt down, and many of his paintings, drawings, and other belongings were destroyed; 
• his drawings from a two-year trip to the Tropic of Capricorn were meant to have been published by the expedition leader, but this never happened; 
• and he rarely sold his works, rather gave them away, so there was little or no commercial interest in his work. 
• Finally, he returned to the UK where he ultimately died in Edinburgh in 1882, far away from where he had made such a big impact - a case of out of sight, out of mind. I doubt whether any inhabitant of Cape Town's suburb of Bellville knows where its name comes from.

Two other things about him appeal to me. First, he enjoyed the grotesque parts of life and often drew people in less than flattering ways. Second, his views were very unusual at the time because he was very unhappy with the way White colonists were taking over lands that did not belong to them. He proposed a type of settlement, which was not adopted.

I wish I had known him - he would have been a wonderful dinner guest to have at the table. I also wish he were better known because he made some significant contributions to South Africa.