Artist Hugo Naudé and his "Motor Karavaan"

Artist Hugo Naudé’s Nomadic Vision and his “Motor Karavaan”

To understand the life of Pieter Hugo Naudé is to understand the slow, rhythmic heartbeat of the nineteenth-century Cape. Born in 1869 on a farm at  Aan-de-Doorns in the Worcester district, Naudé’s earliest memories were framed by the dust of ox-wagons and the steady clip-clop of horses. It was a world where distance was measured by the endurance of a team of oxen and where the horizon was a destination reached through days of patient travel. Yet, when he returned to South Africa in 1896, following years of rigorous study at the Slade School in London, the academies of Munich, and the sun-drenched forests of Fontainebleau, he carried a modern, burning ambition. He sought to capture the "abundance and brilliance" of the South African light with a freshness that the old masters had never quite grasped. He wanted to be a plein air painter, a man who lived in the outdoors and the sun, working directly from nature. But Hugo Naudé, the man who would eventually teach a nation how to see its own landscape, faced a single, insurmountable irony: he did not drive.

For a landscape artist, this was no minor inconvenience. The light Naudé craved—the ephemeral glow on the Waaihoek Mountains, the violet shadows of the Hex River Valley, and the explosive, short-lived brilliance of the Namaqualand daisies—did not come to the studio. One had to go to it. In his younger years, he managed through traditional means. He would set out by horse and cart, staying with hospitable farmers or retreating to his small stone cottage, "Mon Desir," in Hermanus. During this era, the South African interior was a logistical nightmare for an artist. His equipment was heavy and temperamental: large canvases that caught the wind like sails, cumbersome wooden easels, and lead-based oil paints that required careful handling. To be a painter in the veld was to be a frontiersman, lugging a mobile laboratory across unmapped territory.

I recently discovered some fascinating details that clear up my previous misconception about whether Hugo Naudé drove a car. While it turns out he did indeed drive initially, his artistic eye was apparently a bit too active for the road! He was known to instinctively steer his vehicle toward any beautiful scene that caught his attention, leading to several hazardous near-misses. To safely continue his painting trips, he eventually gave up the wheel and employed a driver-gardener, such as Gawie Cupido, to navigate while he focused on the landscape. 

As the twentieth century dawned and the motor car began to sputter into the Cape interior, Naudé found himself in a peculiar position. The world was speeding up, but he remained anchored to the pace of the pedestrian or the passenger. He became a master of the "symbiotic lift." A dedicated network of friends, relatives, and neighbors—recognizing the quiet genius in their midst—stepped up to act as his "pilots." Men like John H. Dommisse and Harvey Greening, the local optician and amateur artist, would load the "Artist" and his gear into their cars and drive him into the rugged heart of the mountains. My father, Solly Kramer, a young Boy Scout in the early 1930s, remembered the Artist as their Scoutmaster, parked in a caravan in the middle of the wild Du Toitskloof long before any modern pass existed. While the boys scrambled over rocks and practiced their knots, Naudé sat motionless before his easel, oblivious to the noise of the troop, his eyes fixed on the fleeting shifts of light against the rock face.

However, as Naudé’s artistic ambitions grew and his desire to reach more remote locations—the Transkei, the Drakensberg, and the arid stretches of the North—intensified, he realized that relying on the whims of drivers was not enough. He needed a radical solution. Between 1925 and 1928, he devised a concept that was decades ahead of its time. He commissioned the construction of a specialized "motorized caravan," built directly onto the sturdy chassis of a Ford lorry. This vehicle was not merely a means of transport; it was a mobile sanctuary, a rolling studio, and a botanical laboratory all in one. Because Naudé never mastered the steering wheel, the caravan remained a collaborative vessel, usually driven by his nephew, Wouter "Wollie" Naudé, or other members of the Naudé and Brown families.

The caravan was a marvel of practical design, specifically tailored to the needs of a man who intended to live inside the landscape for weeks at a time. Externally, it possessed the rugged, utilitarian charm of the late 1920s Ford trucks, but the bodywork was a bespoke wooden structure, painted to withstand the punishing sun. Inside, it was described in auction records as being "gerieflik ingerig"—comfortably equipped. It featured built-in bunks that allowed Naudé to wake up exactly where he needed to be. He no longer had to wait for a friend to drive him to a location at sunrise; he was already there, the first light of Namaqualand hitting his canvas before the dew had even dried on the vygies. The interior was a sanctuary of organized clutter: racks for wet canvases, drawers for tubes of pigment, and a dedicated space for his palettes and brushes.

One of the most vital features of the caravan was its role in Naudé’s other great passion: gardening. He was a devoted collector of indigenous flora, and the caravan was equipped with storage for seeds and botanical specimens. During his legendary spring expeditions to Namaqualand, the vehicle served as a base for his "botanical raids." He would spend his days painting the "multi-coloured display of wonder" that carpeted the desert, and his evenings carefully packing seeds and bulbs to be transported back to his beloved Garden of Remembrance, which he designed, in Worcester. The caravan allowed him to move away from the established tracks and into the very heart of the floral spectacle, sitting in the dirt among the flowers, his mobile home parked just a few yards away, providing shelter from the blistering Northern Cape wind.

The "Golden Era" of the caravan, from 1928 to 1939, saw Naudé reach his civic and artistic peak. It was during these years that he used the vehicle to reach the vantage points for his most significant commissions, including the massive "A View of the Hex River Valley" for South Africa House in London. The caravan provided him with the endurance required for such works. He could observe a single valley for ten days straight, watching how the light hit the vineyards at 10:00 AM versus 4:00 PM, a feat impossible if he were merely a day-tripper. The mobility granted by the Ford chassis gave his work what critics called a "unique freshness of style." He wasn't painting a memory of the veld; he was painting its living, breathing presence.

To the local community of Worcester, the sight of the Naudé caravan rattling out of town was a signal that the seasons were changing. It represented a beautiful exchange: the community provided the mobility, and in return, Naudé provided the vision. He was generous with his work, often gifting smaller paintings of the mountains he had visited to those who had helped him along the way. His nephew, Wollie, recalled these trips as formative experiences, where the caravan became a site of artistic education and communal adventure. It was a place where the boundaries between the 19th-century man and the 20th-century landscape blurred.

Inside the caravan, the atmosphere was one of quiet, disciplined focus. Naudé was a man of the Barbizon tradition, believing that the artist's duty was to be a humble witness to nature. The caravan allowed him to maintain that humility by removing the distractions of the town and the hotel. In the Transkei or the Drakensberg, he could exist in a state of total immersion. He would set up his easel under the shade of the caravan’s side-awning, his palette prepared with the earth tones and brilliant azures that defined his late style. He would work until the "sparkling vygies" faded into the grey of twilight, then retire into the small, wood-paneled cabin to record his thoughts or prepare for the next day's light.

The significance of this vehicle to Naudé’s life's work was underscored at the very end. When he passed away in April 1941, leaving behind a legacy that transformed South African art, his estate was auctioned to the public. The list of items was a heartbreaking inventory of a life lived for beauty: bundles of brushes, well-worn palettes, the famous "Jerusalem Jar" he used for his brushes, and various studies of the mountains. But the most poignant item on the list, sold on July 29, 1941, at 10:00 AM, was the "motor karavaan." It was described in the auction notice as being in "excellent condition," a testament to the care he had taken of his mobile sanctuary.

The sale of the caravan marked the end of an era. It had been the motorized bridge that allowed a man born into the world of ox-wagons to navigate the vastness of the modern South African landscape. Without that Ford chassis and the bespoke studio built upon it, the iconic images of Namaqualand in bloom or the snow-capped peaks of the Boland might never have been captured with such intimacy. Hugo Naudé’s refusal to let his lack of driving skills hinder his vision led to the creation of one of the country’s first specialized motor homes—a vessel that carried the soul of an artist into the heart of the wild. He died having never driven a car, yet through his mobile sanctuary, he traveled further and saw more than almost any of his contemporaries, ensuring that the sunlit soul of the Cape would be preserved for generations to come.

© John Kramer - March 2026