Pulling out the stops at No. 14

The exterior Edwardian architectural grandeur sets the scene for a vibrant interior brimming with cultural and historical artefacts from late South African artist Irma Stern’s far-flung travels. Listed on your free 2022 Arts, Crafts & Museum Map, this destination and exhibition are a must-see.

This year, the museum celebrates its 50th anniversary with a stimulating schedule of star-studded exhibitions, events and talks.

Perfectly preserved just as the flamboyant artist left it, the museum’s character-laden halls vividly evoke the past. Here you can almost imagine the late, great Irma striding into the living room, pausing, brush in hand, before her easel, which remains in her studio with her brushes
and paints alongside it, as if she had only momentarily abandoned them.

After the death of this avant-garde figure in 1966, the house and property, formerly known as The Firs, was opened by the Irma Stern Trust and UCT in 1972 as a museum for to the people of Cape Town and as a cherished cultural port of call.

Even if her resplendent paintings – some of the most famous in the country and commanding the highest ever prices on auction – don’t intrigue you, the house itself warrants a visit just for a voyeuristic glance into how this larger-than-life, creative personality lived. Her bold and unapologetic life was dictated entirely by her own tastes. Idiosyncratic pieces of furniture, such as cupboards, have been lovingly painted by her own hand, and the walls are a cacophony of bright, bold colours. Anyone who has ever visited Charleston Farmhouse in East Sussex, UK, the home of renowned Bloomsbury group painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, will recognise in Irma’s home a marvellous destination of the same order.

She collected Roman, Pre-Columbian American and Eastern pieces, which are displayed alongside furniture from Medieval and Renaissance Europe. The Rosebank museum abounds with unusual keepsakes from Irma’s landmark journeys from Cape Town into various parts of Africa, travels which so impacted on the subject matter of her paintings.