Ephraim Ngatane, who lived a tragically short life, is celebrated as a key figure in the development of what was referred to as township painting. Painted in 1969, Family Group and Pimville Township are at the apex of Ngatane’s brief but decisive contribution to South African Black Modernism, when his shift from watercolour to thickly worked oils intensified his vision of township life. By this stage, Ngatane had emerged from Polly Street and the Jubilee Art Centre as one of the most important of the first professional Black artists, developing a strand of “social domestic realism” that stood apart from more expressionist township styles. These two paintings crystallise his commitment to depicting the lived experience of segregated communities – families, shacks, informal yards, circulation around a car – at the very moment when forced removals, the tightening of influx control and the ever-present threat of the Security Police were reshaping the urban Black majority’s everyday reality. Ngatane’s contemporaries later dubbed him the “Hogarth of the township” for this incisive, narrative realism, which offered both empathetic documentation and quiet indictment. Rather than staging overt protest – a risk that could have led to censorship or imprisonment – he folded social critique into scenes of domestic intimacy and street-level interaction, creating images that are now recognised as foundational records of apartheid-era urban life and as models for subsequent generations of artists grappling with the politics of the everyday.