It is indeed fortuitous that Stanley Pinker can be included in the list of South African artists. He was born in Windhoek from an English father and studied art in Cape Town under Maurice van Essche, but, feeling that his roots lay in Europe, in 1951 he left South Africa to find them. Apart from a brief appearance in Cape Town in 1954 for a one-man exhibition, he felt he belonged in Europe where the pleasure and struggle in discovering new unexplored fields and acquiring new knowledge had begun. He spent the next twelve years there before the battle for survival became too much for him and he eventually decided to return to Cape Town.

Initially he lived in modest circumstances , managing to make ends meet by doing freelan...