The South African National Gallery in Cape Town is hosting a survey exhibition devoted to Moses Tladi, a self-taught painter who in 1931 became the first black artist to exhibit at this important museum. Moses Tladi Unearthed asserts the place of this overlooked artist in the early 20th-century canon of landscape painting.But do not go to the National Gallery with the expectation of seeing an unheralded major talent. In a 1991 letter to art historian Barbara Lindop, exiled painter Gerard Sekoto dryly remarked of Tladi: "He did have some talent."The 30 paintings gathered by curator Andrea Lewis are in the main descriptive of South Africa's natural beauty. They are also portals to a time when any painter with ambition was depicting trees, open ranges, mountains and pregnant clouds.Born in 1903 in Limpopo and mission schooled, Tladi's career predates the postwar vogue for modernist paintings by Irma Stern, Alexis Preller and the like.His career first took shape following his move to Johannesburg and employment as a gardener in the mid-1920s by Herbert Read, a mining boss employed in Julius Wernher's Corner House group.Read's neighbour in Parktown was Howard Pim, a leading accountant and progressive city politician who collected art.After learning that Tladi was painting in his spare time using house paint and sharpened sticks, Read set him up with materials and studio at his home.Read and Pim became influential early promoters of Tladi, who exhibited widely during the 1930s and 1940s. In 1956 Tladi was forcibly evicted from his home and relocated to Soweto. He died three years later.Among the more notable works on show is a scene depicting a mining property once owned by Crown Mines. It is dominated by an angular mine dump.Included in a prominent group exhibition in Johannesburg in 1939, here it is grouped with similar scenes by Walter Battiss and Gwelo Goodman, contemporaries of Tladi. This "in context" showing of Tladi's work is similar to the approach adopted in Venice earlier this year for a show surveying French painter Henri Rousseau. As in that show, Tladi is occasionally upstaged by his contemporaries. But, in the main, he holds his own against Gerard Bhengu, Sydney Carter, Dorothy Kay and George Pemba. This fellowship marks an important step in the rehabilitation of an artist whose achievements have for too long been mothballed and forgotten.On at Iziko South African National Gallery, Cape Town, until next March..