Jacob Hendrik Pierneef was born in Pretoria, 1886. Considered by many to be the quintessential SA artist, revisionist art historians have been keen to expose Pierneef's darker side as the painter of the "mythology" of Afrikaner Nationalism.

His role in SA art, despite this, seems assured because of his unique take on the SA landscape. Pierneef studied briefly at the Rotterdam Academy when his family was in exile in Holland. Back in Pretoria in 1902, he was encouraged in his study of art techniques by his godfather, Anton van Wouw (qv.), and after further tuition from Oerder (qv.) from 1905 to 1908, he sold his first painting in 1910. In Pretoria he met Smithard (qv.) and Wenning (qv.) and learned much about graphic techniques from them. Together they exhibited as members of the The Individualists in 1912.

In 1917 Pierneef was elected a member of SASA, and spent that year producing many woodcuts. In 1918 he was represented on the SASA Annual Exhibition at the City Hall with four of them, and a painting entitled Black, GoU and Green. It was most likely through his connection with Smithard and Wenning that he showed with SASA in Cape Town in 1918 and 1919. Thereafter he is only recorded as having shown on one other exhibition as a member of the National Academy of SA. Here he entered one work entitled Lutheran Church, Martin Meick House, which was shown alongside works by other SASA members at the SANG in 1937. It was perhaps because Pierneef constructed himself as a painter of SA's interior landscape that his link with a Cape-based organisation like SASA seemed to become less relevant in his career.

He believed strongly in the cause of Afrikaner art and culture, and since SASA's outlook was more inclined to British sources of tradition, it was not his spiritual home.

Unlike most SASA members who equated SA landscape with a romanticised vision of the Cape, he instead drew attention to "the formal architecture of the Highveld and presented a rational and perceptive interpretation of its distinctive spatial and structural character" (Berman, 1983:330). He died in 1957, Pretoria.