Anton Anreith

[citation needed] During the baroque era, architecture and sculpture were closely allied and it is likely that Anreith received his training from an artist's studio, such as that of Christian Wenzinger, a sculptor and architect.

[2] Anreith arrived at the Cape of Good Hope as a soldier in the service of the Dutch East-India Company in 1777 on the vessel Woestduijn.

[3] That year he did his first project with the architect, the wine-cellar at Groot Constantia, commissioned by Hendrik Cloete,[2] for which he designed an elaborate baroque pediment, The Rape of Ganymede, a depiction of the myth of the youth, abducted by Zeus in the form of an eagle, who became cup-bearer to the Greek Gods.

[4] In 1789 Thibault and Anreith were joined by Hermann Schutte, an architect and builder from Bremen and the three of them had a profound influence on the development of Cape Town architecture in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

[4] During the years 1785 to 1791, Governor of the Dutch East India Company Colony Cornelis Jacob van de Graaff made a number of improvements to the Castle of Good Hope.

The stucco parapet, Ionic columns, folding door and fanlight, along with teak lion doorknockers, are signature Anreith.

[3] The Lioness Gateway used to serve as entrance to the Company's menagerie, an area now occupied by the Michaelis School of Fine Art.

He became a Freemason in 1797 as a member of the Lodge de Goede Hoop, for which he designed a number of lime plaster statues, of which three survived a fire in 1892: a Silence figure with an owl; a recumbent man with a dagger, book and hourglass; and a weeping woman and child.

[2] During the Batavian Republic (1803–1806), Anreith and Thibault created a drinking fountain for the Parade,[5] no longer extant but echoed in the design of the Hurling Pump in Oranjezicht.