About the artist:

Irma Stern was a major South African artist who achieved national and international recognition in her lifetime. Almost one hundred solo exhibitions were held during her lifetime both in South Africa and Europe, including Germany, France, Italy and England. Although accepted in Europe, her work was unappreciated at first in South Africa, where critics derided her early exhibitions in the 1920s with reviews titled such as "Art of Miss Irma Stern - Ugliness as a cult".

The Irma Stern Museum was established in 1971 and is the house the artist lived in for almost four decades. She moved into The Firs in Rondebosch in 1927 and lived there until her death. Several of the rooms are furnished as she arranged them while upstairs there is a commercial gallery used by contemporary South African artists.

On 8 May 2000, one of her works sold at Sotheby's South Africa in Johannesburg for an all-time record of R1.7 million. This record was soon broken, however, and in March 2007, her 1936 Portrait of an Indian woman was sold for R6.6 million. Stern's Gladioli was sold for an all-time high of R13.3 million in October 2010, but was then followed by the sale of Bahora Girl for R26.7 million later that month - both were also records for sales of South African art at the time. A new South African record was set in March 2011, when a Stern painting sold for R34 million at Bonhams, London.[citation needed]

On 11 November 2012, Stern's painting Fishing Boats was stolen along with four other paintings from a museum in Pretoria. A tip-off led South African police to a cemetery in Port Elizabeth, where four of the five paintings were recovered from under a bench.

From 3 November 2021 to 1 August 2022, the Norval Foundation gallery in Cape Town presents important paintings produced by Irma Stern during her two stays in Zanzibar during the period of 1939 to 1945, and commented on these works as follows:

Her heavily-laden brush deposits swathes of colour and a tracery of mark that evokes at times the sweep and syncopation of Islamic calligraphy. The calligraphy that she encountered in the carved cartouches of the lintels of Zanzibari doors and the Islamic manuscripts which she collected, armed and liberated her mark-making. The boldness of her impasto brushwork results in a tangible embodiment of her sitters and their contexts, such that her decision to frame the works using fragments of Zanzibari doors feels completely in keeping.

— Norval Foundation, Cape Town, The Zanzibari Years: Irma Stern