Lobethal, Ga-Phahla
Born into a family whose knowledge of land and making things would remain a memory always present in his work.
The online museum & gallery · gallery.mosestladi.org
Moses Tladi
South Africa's pioneering Black landscape painter · 1897–1959
Highveld rainstorm landscape, from the Tladi family estate. Reproduced with the family's permission.
The artist
A life bigger than the label “gardener”
Moses Tladi painted weather, distance, orchards, mountains and the homes made within them. His pictures hold a South Africa seen closely, lovingly and against the limits imposed on him.
Born in 1897 at Lobethal, Ga-Phahla, in Sekhukhuneland, and baptised in 1903, Tladi carried the visual memory of Limpopo into his adult life. In Johannesburg he worked at Lokshoek, the Parktown home of Herbert Read, and began to paint with the materials available to him.
By 1931 he had become the first Black artist to exhibit at the South African National Gallery. This museum places that public achievement beside the family's own record: the paintings, photographs, documents and objects that make a fuller account possible.
Read the life in five acts →
A family and public record, brought together
From the collection
Three ways of seeing the land
Each work remains permanently accessible in the Complete Collection. Here, the paintings introduce the larger story.
The Magaliesberg Mountains
signed · oil on Bristol board, 47 × 73,5 cm
The House in Kensington B
signed · oil on Masonite, 37,5 × 77 cm
Lokshoek, Johannesburg, Front Façade
signed, c. 1920s · oil on canvas, 25 × 35 cm
A life marked in years
Milestones that changed the record
The artist's biography is inseparable from the country he lived through. These are entry points into a much fuller account.
A gardener begins to paint
In Johannesburg, Tladi made those memories work in and around the gardens of Lokshoek in Parktown.
A national first
He became the first Black artist to exhibit at the South African National Gallery in Cape Town.
Removal and silence
Apartheid forced the family from Kensington B. Tladi never painted again.
A national stamp
Mont-Aux-Sources entered the national philatelic record in the Iziko Museum bicentenary issue.
The family archive
The evidence of a life
Paintings do not stand alone. Family-held objects, documents and place photographs allow visitors to encounter Tladi's world in detail.
1897Birth year recorded by the Tladi family
1903Baptism, not birth — the source of the longstanding public error
1931First Black artist to exhibit at the South African National Gallery
2025Mont-Aux-Sources appears on a South African stamp
Listen
The Gardener Who Painted South Africa
A family-created audio story of Moses Tladi's life, made to be heard alongside the art and archive.