The final image in this collection represents a Krige ideal. The platteland dorps of his childhood and youth constituted a paradisiacal realm, one that he returned to in the last decades of his life when he settled in Montagu. His many village drawings suggest a deep affection for such environments: vernacular architecture, established trees and the wildness of nature just beyond the town limits. It was this ‘utopia’ he sought out again and again, both in South Africa and Europe, where Italian, Portuguese and Spanish villages are repeatedly drawn. We see the artist striving to capture the genius loci, the spirit of place. ‘Boland Dorp’ is an evocative sketch that brings all these elements together in an unnamed townscape: ancient oak trees, a footbridge over a stream leading the eye into a village dominated by a neo-Gothic spire and beyond it the mountains, the realm of nature, rising up to embrace the town. For Krige, there is a spiritual dimension to such elements. It is, after all and ultimately, home. – Justin Fox, 2013