Bertha (King) Everard trained initially as a concert pianist in Vienna but later studied painting at the Slade and Westminster art schools in London and the St Ives School of Landscape in Cornwall. She began teaching at the Staats Model School in Pretoria in 1902, but after marrying Charles Everard in 1903, moved with him to Bonnefoi, a small trading post on the Eastern Transvaal escarpment near C