Her brushes were left where she put them down. I kept meaning to go and see them, and I did not.
Irma Stern was born at Schweizer-Reneke in 1894, trained in Berlin and Weimar, and had her first solo exhibition in Berlin in 1916 with Max Pechstein's backing — which is to say she came home to South Africa an Expressionist, and was told at length that this was a mistake. She bought a house called The Firs in Rosebank in 1927 and lived in it until she died in 1966. She painted in it, travelled out of it — Zanzibar, the Congo, Europe, repeatedly — and brought back the objects that furnished it. Her will left the collection in trust for the advancement of the fine arts, and a few years after her death the house opened as a museum, administered by the University of Cape Town on the Trust's behalf.
What people who have been there describe is not a gallery with a house attached. Three rooms — sitting room, dining room, studio — were kept as she arranged them, among the ethnographic pieces she had gathered on her journeys and hung and stacked and lived with. In the studio her easel, her rags, her brushes and her painting coat were left exactly as she left them. That is the arrangement this directory exists to record, and it is a rarer thing than the number of artists' houses in the world would suggest: most are reconstructions after the fact, assembled by people who never met the woman. This one was simply not tidied.
It closed to visitors on 31 October 2025. The University and the Trust ended a partnership that had run fifty-six years; an architectural assessment in 2023 had found the building no longer fit to hold what was in it, and the most vulnerable works are going into a purpose-built conservation store while The Firs — returning to the Trust under the terms of the original 1969 contract — is refurbished. Her paintings have not vanished: the Trust and the Norval Foundation opened the first of four exhibitions on 12 February 2026, under the title Irma Stern: A life of displacement. But the paintings were never the point of the address. The point of the address was the coat on the back of the chair, and that is not currently anywhere a visitor can stand. I am leaving this plate in the directory, unphotographed, until it is.
The plates are held empty on purpose. I do not publish photographs of rooms I have not stood in, and these rooms are, for the moment, not standable in by anyone.
A house can be preserved for fifty years and still run out of time.
Stern left instructions and money and a trust, which is more foresight than most collectors manage, and for fifty-odd years the arrangement held. Then the roof and the walls and the climate of a domestic house in Rosebank turned out to be, on assessment, a slow danger to the pictures hanging in them. The very thing that made the place worth visiting — that it was a house and not a museum — is the thing that eventually made it unable to go on being one.
The closure was not quiet. It was argued over in the papers and in letters and by people with a far better claim to grieve it than mine. I have no standing in that argument; I have only the small, ordinary regret of a person who had a house on a list for years and kept putting the flight off because the house had been there since 1971 and would presumably go on being there.
The lesson is not subtle and I am recording it here rather than in my own head, where I would forgive myself for it. Go to the small houses first. They are the ones that close.