The Jalmar and Ione Rudner collection of southern African San rock objects

Jalmar Rudner was born in Sweden in 1917, and emigrated to South Africa in 1949 where he worked as a town-planner for the City of Cape Town. He was appointed an honorary archaeologist at the South African Museum in 1956, and was instrumental in establishing the Rock Art Recording Centre at the museum to co-ordinate rock art information and their preservation.

From the early 1950s through to the late 1960s, Jalmar and his wife, Ione Rudner, (born Cape Town, 1926) spent their time locating and recording San paintings by undertaking some fifty expeditions and many field trips across southern Africa as far north as northern Angola and Zimbabwe. On these journeys they traced rock art in-situ at hundreds of sites which they worked into exact life-size watercolours on their return.

Their initial interest in rock art evolved out of their friendship with Prof A.J.H. Goodwin of the archaeology department at the University of Cape Town, whom they met soon after their marriage in 1950.

The Rudners' research in rock art culminated in the publication of their joint book, The hunter and his art: a survey of rock art in southern Africa (Cape Town, 1970); and in her Masters dissertation published as Khoisan pigments and paints and their relationship to rock paintings, In Annals of the South African Museum, 87, (March 1982). Their pioneering field-work and their book, which was one of the first comprehensive studies of rock art throughout southern Africa, was a major contribution to the subject at the time of its publication.

Their extensive collection of objects was collected in the field, and as well as from missionary collections that were sold in the 1950s in Cape Town. The Tollman family acquired the collection for display at Bushman's Kloof in 2003.