J. F. Roux

Jacobus François Roux (J. F. Roux or François Roux) was a South African artist who painted the African landscape en plein air. He also painted portraits and still lifes.
Early life
Roux was born in Fort Victoria, Southern Rhodesia (now Masvingo, Zimbabwe). His father, also Jacobus François, was a Dutch Reformed Church missionary, who founded the Jichidza mission station in the Zaka District of current-day Zimbabwe. The mission, which still exists, lies to the south-east of the main Morgenster mission (founded by Andrew Louw in 1891). Roux's mother, Elizabeth Maria (née Jordaan), was a farmer’s daughter from Dordrecht, Eastern Cape.
From 1940-1946, Roux attended the Boys’ High School in Stellenbosch. After school hours, he studied painting with Siegfried Hahn at the Stellenbosch Technical College (from 1943-45). Hahn had just returned to the Cape from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He imparted to Roux his knowledge of classical painting techniques in the tradition of the nineteenth-century French teacher, Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran.
Studies in London
After finishing high school in 1946, Roux left for England. He first studied at the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts (now the Camberwell College of Arts) in London and then travelled in Europe. In 1947, Roux enrolled in the Royal Academy of Arts in London, qualifying with a Diploma in Painting in 1951. In 1943, three years before his arrival in London, his older brother, Theunis Christoffel, had been shot down and killed over the coast of France while flying a mission as a Hallifax bomber pilot.
Whilst in London, Roux participated in several group exhibitions of Young Contemporaries in 1950 and The London Group in 1951). He befriended the watercolourist, Lady Edna Clark Hall and stayed at her Great House, in Essex.
Return to Rhodesia
When Roux’s mother fell ill in 1951, he returned to his childhood home in Southern Rhodesia. Roux began applying the techniques he had learned, first under Hahn, and then at the Royal Academy, to depict the African landscapes of his rural upbringing.
From his return to Southern Rhodesia in 1951 until 1967, Roux exhibited his work at annual exhibitions at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe (then the Rhodes National Gallery). Apart from his art and caring for his parents, he also performed compulsory military service in the Rhodesian army, as a cook.
In 1964, Roux married Margaret Bridgen, a school teacher from England who had travelled to Southern Rhodesia to join her brother, David. They had two sons, Paul David Roux and Theunis Robert Roux.
Life in Cape Town
In December 1967, Roux moved with his family to South Africa.
From 1970 -1978, Roux served as a part-time lecturer in painting at the Cape Technikon, after which he continued to teach privately. His early painting trips were to the Cape West Coast - Velddrif, Saldanha and Langebaan. There he painted scenes of fishing boats in the various harbours. Some of these paintings are done in a stripped-down, blocks-of-colour style. Others are less brightly coloured and more detailed.
From 1968, Roux started to paint in the Cederberg mountains, near Clanwilliam. Roux’s other main painting destination in the 1970s and 1980s was Laingsburg, Western Cape. Roux started going to Laingsburg before the great flood of 1981. Afterwards he painted scenes of the devastated landscape carved out by the raging Buffalo River.
After his wife Margaret died in 2000, Roux formed a relationship with Margot Gawith, a former art student. Roux's later work depicts landscapes from Margot's properties near Aurora, outside Piketberg, Hermanus and Aasfontein (a small hamlet near Arniston). Roux died in Rondebosch on 21 April 2013.
Major portrait commissions
In the mid-1980s, Roux found temporary establishment favour in a series of commissioned portraits: of the Mayor of Cape Town, the Speaker of the House of Assembly, the headmaster of the Diocesan College and a former rear admiral of the navy.
* Alderman Kosie van Zyl, former Mayor of Cape Town (1982)
* J. P. du Toit, former speaker of House of Assembly (1983)
* Anthony Mallett, former Headmaster of the Diocesan College, Cape Town (1982)
Public collections
* South African National Gallery, Cape Town (self-portrait)
* Pretoria Art Museum (Cederberg, Wolfberg cracks)

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