“Then there was Louisa Williams, the old oyster woman – who could remember the days back almost a hundred years ago … her black face and faded eyes, canopied by the stiff frilled white ‘Dutch Kappie’.
I painted two portraits of her and later made an etching. ‘Poor old Louisa was grateful for the job of being a model, as it saved her from having to risk her life in the sea, wading out chest high in the water, breaking off any oysters to be found on the rocks. Her husband had been washed away, she told me, years before. Old slaves from Madagascar were her people … her manners the finest that any person of gentle birth could wish to have.”