Stefan Ampenberger was born in 1908 in Munich, Germany, and came to South Africa in 1926, beginning a peripatetic life that shaped both his artistic development and the subjects of his work. During the 1930s he met the artist J. H. Amshewitz in Johannesburg, whose mentorship provided an important early influence on his emerging practice.

Ampenberger later married the artist Iris, and together they travelled throughout South Africa for seventeen years in a caravan, a long nomadic period that deeply informed his landscape-based work. Their travels exposed Ampenberger to a wide range of South African environments, and this engagement with place became central to his artistic identity.

In 1964 the couple settled permanently in T...