Nina Hamnett (1890 – 1956) was a Welsh artist and writer, who became known as the ‘Queen of Bohemia’. Between 1906 to 1907 she studied at the Pelham Art School and then at the London School of Art until 1910. In 1914 she went to Paris, to study.
Nina returned to London, where she continued her Bohemian lifestyle that had begun in Paris.
Her artistic style was post-impressionistic and noticeably avant-garde occasionally. She was a fine portraitist as can be seen at a small exhibition dedicated to her paintings at the Tate Britain., which will continue until 23 May 2027.
Amongst the portraits at the Tate, there is one depicting an Indian. Hamnett’s studio notebook recorded the model as “Chanda”.
The Tate’s label suggests the subject was “Apurva Kuma Chanda”. ‘[Kuma’ is most probably ‘Kumar’.] Apurva was known to have been close to Nina’s circle of friends.
I became curious about him.
Apurva was a son of Indra Kumar Chanda of Silchar in northeast India – in Assam. Apurva and his brother Anil Kumar Chanda were very close to the great Bengali cultural figure Rabindranath Tagore, and promoted his work, notably his songs that became known as ‘Rabindra Sangeet’. He lived from 1893 to 1967, and would have been about 15 when Nina painted him in about 1918.
Looking at the picture, which depicts a young man with a drink in his hand, he looks like a very mature 15 year old – or, possibly, the painting is not of Apurva, but someone else.
Apurva or not, the paintings of Nina Hamnett are well worth seeing.
I do not know why I suddenly thought about them when waking this morning, but several mnemonics came to mind. All of them I learned at school. Here are a few:
BODMAS : Brackets Of Division Multiplication Addition Substraction
Referring to the order in which arithmetic operations are carried out.
Shortly before setting out on a trip to Yugoslavia in 1975, I had just finished reading “Bosnian Chronicle” by the Yugoslav writer Ivo Andrić (1892-1975). This novel is set in the Bosnian town of Travnik during the early years of the nineteenth century and atmospherically portrays the relationships between the families of the French and Austrian consuls and their Ottoman ‘hosts’.After a short bus ride from Mostar through the forested hills of Bosnia, I disembarked in Travnik – the town in whichAndrić was born.
During the journey to Travnik through the hilly Bosnian landscape, I noticed short stretches of disused narrow-gauge railways that wound their way through the countryside. Some years later, when I lived and worked in Gillingham in Kent, I was friendly with an elderly lady, a retired teacher, called Mary Stephenson. We had a common interest in classical music. When I got to know her better, she told me that she had been a keen amateur movie maker and that she and her late husband, both having been interested in railways, had made tours around Europe visiting narrow-gauge lines. They had visited Bosnia, and she was able to show me the brief movies that she had made whilst travelling on the narrow-gauge lines that I had glimpsed.
After booking into a hotel, I began to wander around the streets of old Travnik that nestle beneath the city’s fortress, which contains a polygonal tower. I explored the town’s old mosques; ‘türbe’ (small, usually decorative, pavilions containing the Islamic tombs of notable people); and other fine architecture dating back to the Ottoman period. At first, I was alone, but not for long. A young man, maybe in his early twenties, approached me and asked in tolerably good English whether he could show me around. As he seemed friendly enough, I agreed.
My new companion led me through Travnik and out into the surrounding countryside. We walked along a lane, and soon arrived at a small single-storied cottage with a steeply pitched roof. It was surrounded by a small patch of land filled with flowers and vegetables. The building consisted of not much more than two rooms. We entered, and were greeted by an old lady dressed in folk costume. My friend introduced me to her, his grandmother, and she showed me the many framed sepia photographs that competed for the limited amount of space on her walls. She told me about them in her language, and her grandson translated for me. Many of the pictures looked as if they had been taken before the First World War.
Our next port of call was my new companion’s family home, an apartment on the first floor of an unremarkable modern building in a new part of the town. My friend introduced me to his mother and then to his younger brother, who was labouring over some schoolwork. I noticed that amongst the things on the boy’s worktable there was a textbook on the English language. I picked it up and saw that its first chapter was headed ‘The Black Country’. Its first words were,
“Where there’s muck, there’s brass.”
I still wonder how much sense that would have made to a young Bosnian lad, or even his teacher.
Later that day, my new friend fetched me from my hotel. It was evening and in the centre of the town people were enjoying the ‘corso’. During my visits to Greece, many of which were made long before I began exploring Yugoslavia, I used to watch people enjoying, what I was led to believe was called, the ‘corso’. It occurs in the evening in the centre of a town or along the seashore, and consists of people enjoying the cool evening air and meeting friends whilst wandering to and fro along a more or less well-defined stretch of pavement or street.
Travnik had its own ‘corso’ or evening promenade. Unlike many that I had witnessed before, this one was highly organised. People walked two-by-two around a definite, but unmarked circle in one of the town’s open spaces. My companion and I joined this human conveyor belt. Every now and then, my new friend would suddenly dart off to meet someone, whom he spotted sitting at a table outside a café or standing away from the ‘corso’. After exchanging a few words with his acquaintance, he would rejoin me in the ‘corso’.
Thus, I ended my pleasant day in Travnik.
I never discovered my companion’s name. I am not sure that I will ever be able to find out whether he survived the Bosnian war of the 1990s, and is leading a good life today.
IT IS WIDELY KNOWN that artists are often influenced by aspects of cultures’ other than their own. For example, Paul Gaugin was influenced by the culture and arts of Polynesia, other parts of Asia, and Africa.
Likewise, artists in nineteenth century Bengal were influenced by Western European artistic styles and techniques.
Recently, at a stand in London’s Frieze Masters 2026, I saw a painting by an unknown Bengali artist. Created in the nineteenth century, the painting depicts a Hindu mythological subject: “Annapurna feeding Lord Shiva”. What is interesting about this artwork is that the painter has been influenced by european artistic techniques. This is evident in the modelling of the figures, the use of perspective, and the naturalistic backdrop, which evokes the style of eighteenth century and earlier European artists.
Although artists in Bengal adopted European painting techniques, they began to abandon them in the early twentieth century as aspirations for Indian independence began to grow,
Today, I ate lunch at a Colombian café in south London. The desserts included “chocolate with cheese”, which, out of curiosity, I ordered.
What arrived was a mug of hot chocolate accompanied by three generous slices of a soft, white, tasteless cheese.
The waiter seemed to suggest that dipping the cheese into the chocolate was not necessary, but I might have misunderstood him.
I have heard of chalk and cheese, as in the saying: ‘chalk and cheese’, which refers to two items or people that have nothing in common. But, chocolate with cheese was new to me.
Is there a ‘correct’ way of enjoying chocolate with cheese in Colombia?
I FIRST SAW THE GRAND PORTICO OF UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON (‘UCL’) when I was 12 years old, and it impressed me greatly.
7 years later, when I was trying to decide what to study at university, I was advised by a family friend, the biologist Professor Lewis Wolpert (1929-2021). He suggested that physiology was the subject that fitted in well with my interests at the time. Back in the late 1960s, UCL was the best place to study physiology in the UK. So, when Lewis Wolpert suggested that I apply there, rather than Cambridge, I remembered the portico and was happy that I would be attending courses at UCL.
On my first day at UCL, one of my fellow first-year physiology students was a young lady from India. Several years later, she became my wife.
Maybe I should thank Lewis Wolpert not only for suggesting I study at UCL, but also for making it possible to meet my future spouse.
Pacita Abad (1946-2004) was born in the Philippines, and died in Singapore.
Her interest in the plight refugees is reflected in her works. The 1998 work “Angkor Wat” is a magnificent example of this.
Using the Hindu-Buddhist temple at Siem Riep in Cambodia as the main subject on her creation, she incorporates paintings of Cambodian refugees. The resulting artwork is a spectacular sight.
We were lucky to have seen this work which was being displayed by the Alison Jacques Gallery during the Frieze Masters 2026 art fair held in London’s Regents Park.
This lengthy – you have been warned – essay describes the adventures of some German Jewish migrants to southern Africa during the nineteenth century, and how their activities led to my mother’s father coming to South Africa, where she was born.
A typical pattern of migration from one country to another is that if one member of a family is successful in his or her new home, other members of the family will follow. Such was the case for Jews who moved to South Africa. After Heinrich Bergmann arrived in South Africa from Germany in 1849 (see:https://activeauthor.substack.com/p/a-letter-written-from-cape-town-in), relatives such as his brother and his cousin Jakob Seligmann followed in his footsteps. Sigmund Seligmann (1856-1939), Jakob Seligmann’s younger brother, also arrived in the Cape Colony. As will be described, Sigmund invited his cousin Klothilde Rieser’s son Emanuel Rieser to follow him. Later, Sigmund invited his nephew Iwan Bloch (1886-1931), my grandfather, to take over his department store in Barkly East at the beginning of the twentieth century. I found Sigmund’s story interesting. I hope you will.
Some years ago, I received two fascinating documents which provided much of the information below. One of these, which I call Klothilde’s Diary, consists of a photographic album with handwritten entries of events that were important to my great-great-grandmother Klothilde Rieser (1841-1921). The other document is the unpublished autobiography of Sigmund Seligmann, shown to me by his granddaughter. Both Sigmund and Emanuel figure importantly in the history of my mother’s side of the family. In this essay, the emphasis is on Sigmund’s story.
Sigmund was born in Ichenhausen, Bavaria, in 1856, the twelfth of the 18 children born of Hale (née Springer) and Isak Rafael Seligmann. Of these 18, 15 survived to adulthood. By 1872, two of his elder brothers, Julius and Daniel, had migrated to Illinois in the USA; and his brother Jakob, as described above, was in South Africa.
On 3 September 1872, a month before his 16th birthday, Sigmund Seligmann left Ichenhausen and began a journey to the USA. He travelled from Hamburg on the steamer Thuringia, which called in at Le Havre on its way to Hoboken in New Jersey, where he disembarked. After a ten-day sea voyage, Sigmund made his way to Springfield in Illinois. From there, he travelled to the tiny settlement of Rienzi, where his brother Julius had a farmstead. He described this place as consisting of:
“… a shop, a blacksmith forge and a doctor’s house and a few other buildings. About a mile or more from there stood a lovely schoolhouse, to which the children of the surrounding countryside went. I was sent there also for a short time. I took my food with me in a tin bucket…”
I have an old cadastral map of the Cotton Hill District of Sangamon County which shows exactly where Julius Seligmann and his family lived during the time when his brother Sigmund stayed with him. Today, Rienzi no longer exists; it lies submerged beneath a man-made lake. Sigmund learned English quickly, and by December 1872 he had a job “… collecting taxes…” by which he probably meant recovering debts. However, he did not enjoy his life in the USA, and began returning homewards on 16 January 1874. Sigmund travelled home by way of Cincinnati and Philadelphia. In both places he had relatives, who had migrated from Germany.
Soon after Sigmund’s return to Bavaria, he decided, for reasons that he did not state in his autobiography, to move to South Africa. It was most probable that he did so because members of his family were already becoming established there. He arrived in Rouxville, where he:
“… obtained employment with a Mr Wiarda, a gentleman of German extraction, who traded in Rouxville in the Orange Free State.”
He worked six days a week from sunset to sundown, and rested on Sundays. Near the end of his two years stay with Wiarda, an important event in Germany was also celebrated in faraway Rouxville. This was the 80th birthday of Kaiser Wilhelm, which occurred on 22 March 18, 1877.
Sigmund’s detailed description of the celebration of the Kaiser’s 80th birthday reveals much about the Germans living in Rouxville at that time:
“For some time prior to the day, we Germans planned a great celebration and got together to organize the festivities. There was shop owner Mr Meier, his employee Amman Zinn, my own boss Mr Wiarda, two Seligmanns, two Hellmans, two Rosenfells[sic],a Reichenberger and a Bergmann.”
Of the persons that Sigmund listed, he was related (by the Seligmann line) to Jakob Seligmann, Jakob and Julius Rosenfels, and Ludwig Bergmann. Sigmund continued his description of the festivities as follows:
“We were all ‘Germans’ irrespective of the fact that the majority were of the Jewish persuasion! One of our concerns was that we had no German beer. Then we heard of a trader whose several ox spans were en route from the coast laden with goods amongst which there was a crate with 36 bottles of Bavarian beer. These ox wagons arrived in Rouxvillejust in time, on the eve of our party. They got a rousing welcome! The party was held in the room of my boss Mr Wiarda, and was very successful; we enjoyed it greatly. I heard the new German anthem sung for the first time, ‘Deutschland, Deutschland, über Alles…’. I was much moved and felt very proud…”
Soon after this celebration, Sigmund left Mr Wiarda and Rouxville and took up employment with Mr Oelschig, a German – probably not Jewish, in Lady Grey, which was in the Cape Colony. It was:
“… a place even smaller than Rouxville; but, unlike Rouxville, it had beautiful trees and lovely gardens.”
What Sigmund said about the difference between these places in 1877 was still true when we visited them in 2003.
In about 1880, Sigmund was offered a partnership in a failing trading business owned by a Mr Dunker, a German in Lady Grey. He discussed this offer with Mr Oelschig, who said:
“It is six years since you were home and saw your family. Take a trip home. Visit your mother… You can be back in October for the wool season, and I intend to give you a share of the profits in addition to your regular wage.”
During Sigmund’s brief stay in Germany, he used part of his time to buy merchandise for Mr Oelschig. These would become the first goods that Oelschig had ever imported from Germany. Sigmund also invited his cousin’s son Emanuel Rieser to accompany him back to South Africa. Emanuel’s mother Klothilde, who was then living in Augsburg, wrote in her Diary:
“My dear son Emanuel left on Saturday 25 April 1881 (eve of Rosh Hashanah) for Africa. May God hear my prayers … for good fortune, blessings and a long life for him.”
This entry was typical of many that she made each time a member of her family set off for South Africa or visited her from there.
When Sigmund arrived in Cape Town, he left Emanuel there because, being an employee, he was not able to offer him employment. Emanuel moved to Paarl, where he got a job, which Sigmund describes as follows:
“He was given a two-horse wagon, which was loaded up with household goods. He had to drive this to the farms in the vicinity and exchanged the goods for ostrich feathers.”
Many years later, Emanuel’s son, the artist Dolf Rieser, wrote the following in his unfinished autobiography:
“Many other original stories told by my father come to mind. When he was very young he took all sorts of jobs. At the age of about seventeen he was employed on an Ostrich farm. In those days the wing and tail feathers were very much sought after and fetched high prices. He knew nothing about these grotesque birds at the time. When walking one day from the farmhouse veranda to his lodgings, he suddenly received an enormous punch between the shoulder blades that threw him over and tore his shirt and jacket. The bird that had attacked him then sat on top of him trying to hit him. Now an enraged Ostrich can quite easily kill a man with his four enormous toe claws, but luckily for my father these birds can only hit upwards or straight ahead and not downwards. The farmers shouted to my father from the veranda not to get up and they pulled the bird off him. In order to pluck the feathers from these birds a stocking was put over their head to stop them seeing what was happening, as otherwise they would attack.”
All went well until, as Sigmund Seligmann pointed out:
“Suddenly, out of the blue, the demand for ostrich feathers ceased. The birds were not worth feeding and one often read in the newspapers how the farmers let the ostriches go free into the bush…”
A great slump in the demand for ostrich feathers occurred in the mid-1880s. Emanuel became unemployed.
A few months after Emanuel lost his job, Mr Oelschig required extra help and, following Sigmund’s recommendation, he employed Emanuel Rieser. Later, after Sigmund had left Oelschig, Emanuel became one of the three persons who ran Mr Oelschig’s firm after he retired from it.
In 1883, Sigmund was offered an equal-share partnership in Oelschig’s firm which was doing very well at the time. For various reasons that included worries about anti-Semitism and also Oelschig’s extravagant lifestyle, Sigmund declined it. At the end of the year, in December, Sigmund felt that it was time to move on, and left Oelschig on friendly terms.
Before continuing with the description of Sigmund’s life after leaving Lady Grey, we will return to Klothilde’s Diary because it describes how, one after another, each of her remaining three children left her, and then later Germany. All were bound for South Africa. First:
“My daughter Paula left on Old Year’s Eve for Africa…Augsburg, 1 January 1885.”
Only six weeks later:
“My dearly beloved daughter Paula became engaged to Mr Michaelis Arnholz on 15 February 1885 in Rouxville. Augsburg, 18 March 1885.”
Was this a case of love at first sight, or something a little less random? I feel that it was the latter. Mr Arnholz was from Pomerania, far away from southern Germany where the Riesers lived. Paula and Michaelis were married in Rouxville on the 1st of April 1885. Two years later another unmarried Rieser girl, Hedwig, headed southwards. She went to Rouxville to join her sister Paula, and then a few months later she became engaged to another Jew from Germany, who was living in South Africa. In 1888, Klothilde’s youngest child Jakob set sail for the Cape Colony. Thus, one by one Emanuel Rieser’s siblings followed him out to South Africa.
Returning to Sigmund Seligmann’s story, we meet Moses (‘Moss’) Vallentine, a British-born Jew, who was working in Lady Grey at the same time as Sigmund Seligmann. They were friends, and became collaborators in a new business when Sigmund left Mr Oelschig in December 1883. As Moss had little capital, Sigmund took him on as an employee, offering him a share in any profits that they might generate. Sigmund planned to open a trading business based on his experiences in the USA:
“During my two year stay in the United States, mainly on farms, I gained insight and knowledge of the needs of the American farmers and knew that those of the Boers farmer would be very similar. But I preferred to sell German goods.”
Sigmund knew that he could have bought goods more cheaply from the USA than from Germany, but he favoured the latter for reasons that he did not state. Sigmund wrote:
“German export to South Africa was not yet well-established and I believe I substantially contributed to its growth.”
After Sigmund and Moss had completed a buying trip in Germany and England, where they purchased building materials for a new shop, during early 1884, they returned to the Eastern Cape. In September 1884, the new shop – a small affair – was opened in Dordrecht, which is about 70 miles directly south of Lady Grey. It was so great a success that Moss felt that he could afford to send for his fiancée Amelia Victoria Green, who was in London, to come out to join him in Africa. They married soon after her arrival.
According to the novelist Olive Schreiner (1855-1920), who lived in Dordrecht in 1871, the place was:
“… a miserable village on the side of a hill without trees and with no water. A poor little hotel and everything speaks of poverty and want of enterprise…”
Despite Sigmund’s injection of enterprise 14 years later, Dordrecht had not changed much by the time that we visited it in 2003.
During Sigmund’s stay in Lady Grey, many of Oelschig’s customers -farmers – relocated to the new town of Barkly East. It was 6000 feet above sea-level, and had been established on the lands of Rocky Farm in 1874. In the knowledge that he would have a good number of friends in Barkly East, Sigmund decided to open his own new shop in that newish town, which is about 50 mountainous miles southeast of Lady Grey. He began setting up shop in November 1885. His first accommodation for it was a corrugated iron shed that he bought at an auction in the Indian Ocean port of East London. He had it erected on a plot of land that he had bought. The store was a success even before it opened properly:
“The only goods from the Dordrecht shop I carried with me in my wagon were several dozen Christmas Cards, very artistic ones, printed on velveteen. Barkly East had seen nothing like it! While the carpenter was putting up shelves in one part of the building, I displayed the Christmas Cards on a packing crate and was inundated with customers. They were still milling about as several ox-carts brought all my other merchandise.”
Soon after the shop opened in 1886, Sigmund needed an assistant. He engaged Moss Vallentine’s brother Jacob (‘Jack’), who was then unemployed in Lady Grey. By 1889, the corrugated iron building was replaced by a larger and sturdier single-storied brick building. Soon after this, Sigmund opened a branch store in Moshesh’s Ford, which:
“… lay further into the mountains, approximately a 3-hour ride away, across the Kraai River.”
On the last day of 1889, Sigmund married Ernestine Perlmutter , who was born in Radziejew in Poland and had travelled out from Ichenhausen to South Africa that year. She was a daughter of Heimann Perlmutter – a Cantor in the synagogue of Ichenhausen. Soon after Sigmund married, his assistant Jack married Ernestine’s sister Helene, who was later to perish in the Holocaust.
Sigmund and Ernestine’s first child, Reinhold, was born in Barkly East in November 1892. A second child, Mathilde (‘Sissy’), was born in 1894. By this time, Sigmund’s business was doing so well that he had sufficient work to need more helpers. This, and Jack’s unexpected death in 1897, resulted in Sigmund inviting three of his nephews from Germany to help him in South Africa. They were Jakob Krämer, Moritz Rosenberger, and Julius Cornelius. The first two were grandchildren of Sigmund’s father Isak Rafael Seligmann. Julius was Sigmund’s nephew by marriage. He was the brother of Frieda Cornelius, who married Jakob Krämer.
After the death of Jack and the arrival of his nephews in 1897, Sigmund decided that his children ought to be educated in Germany rather than South Africa, and that it was a good time to return to Germany. He decided that his nephews should take over the running of his business ‘S Seligmann & Co.’
Sigmund and his family travelled to Germany in May 1898, and settled in Munich, from where he maintained an interest in the running of his firm by helping to buy German goods for the shops in South Africa. A patriotic German, but a naturalized British citizen, Sigmund volunteered as a helper in a military hospital in Munch during WW1. His son, Reinhold, like so many Jews in Germany volunteered for military service as soon as the Great War began. He was awarded the Iron Cross, 2nd Class for his services to Germany. As part of his duties whilst in France, Reinhold became one of the first people involved in aerial reconnaissance.
Sigmund died in Munich in 1939, by which time the rest of his family had reached Palestine, where they lived throughout WW2 and after that. The business that he left behind in South Africa continued to flourish in the hands of his three nephews. After a while, they were joined by some of his other nephews. Amongst these was Iwan Bloch, my grandfather, about whom I will tell you another day. Because he moved to South Africa, my mother and her siblings were born in that country.
This is an abbreviated extract without annotations from my book “Exodus to Africa”, which is available from Amazon.
‘Kensho‘ is a Zen Buddhist term meaning ‘seeing one’s essence’. It is the name used by the London art gallery Tristan Hoare (in Fitzroy Square) for an exhibition being held until 31 October 2026.
The exhibition features ceramics by Taizo Kuroda (1946-2021) and works in ink by Sousai Inada (born 1949). Both are Japanese.
The exhibition is small but very satisfying and the gallery provides a wonderful setting for the artwork.
Once when I was about 12 years old, an American, who claimed to be related to my mother, came to dinner at our family home in north London. I had the impression that my parents had no idea who he was. He brought with him a file filled with papers, which he looked at while we were eating. During dinner, he turned to my mother, and said:
“You know you are related to Dr Albert Einstein.”
My mother thought he was pulling her leg, but the event remained in my mind.
Several decades later, I was researching my family tree. One of my mother’s ancestors, her grandmother was Hedwig Ginsberg (née Rieser). Hedwig’s grandmother was one Sarah Rieser, whose maiden name was Sarah Einstein. When I spotted this, along with her dates of birth, marriage, and death, I contacted two leading Einstein genealogists. Both were certain that Sarah Einstein was a blood relative of the famous physicist Albert Einstein. To cut a long story short, my mother was Albert Einstein’s third cousin three times removed – a relative, but not a close one.
Some years later, I was looking into whether Albert Einstein had ever applied to Albania for a visa so that he could emigrate from Nazi Germany. As part of my enquiries, I contacted an Einstein archive in Israel, mentioning en passant the nature of my relationship with the great man.
I received an email that confirmed what I had suspected. Namely, that Einstein never approached Albania for a visa.
Then came a blow to my ego. The lady who wrote to me from Israel pointed out that at the very most I shared only 1% of my genes with those of Albert Einstein.
Still, even 1% of such a genius’s genetic material must be worth having! What do you think?
