There were works by local artists like J.P. Meyer, who paints blurry, sepia-toned scenes of men and boys in athletic poses. Watershed also sells pillows whose covers feature more whimsical Schadeberg photographs like that of an African jazz trio wreathed in a nightclub’s cigarette smoke. We came away with a shapely ceramic vase whose design of pink flecks was created by Mr. Meyer. It now sits in our living room.

Prince Albert is home to 30 painters, sculptors, designers and crafts makers, Mr. Steiner, Watershed’s owner, informed us. They are drawn by the village’s serenity and seclusion. Their paintings and sculptures are available down the main road at the Gallery, which also has a busy cafe.

From rock paintings to typewriters

When I asked Mr. Steiner when Prince Albert became an artist’s colony, his answer was gently admonishing of a Western perspective: “The first artists to make their mark,” he said, “were the Khoi-San who interpreted this arid ancient stretch of territory on the walls of caves and rock faces.”

Khoi-San is the catchall term for two groups of southern Africa’s indigenous blacks who are not speakers of Bantu languages, as the majority Zulu and Xhosa are. Known for the clicking sounds of their consonants, they had herded, foraged and hunted along the Swartberg slopes for thousands of years until they were gradually displaced by Bantu expansion some 1,500 years ago, and then pushed out by musket-wielding white settlers in the mid-18th century. The settlers derogatorily called them Hottentots (Khoi) and Bushmen (San). Their descendants today number about 400,000 and are scattered around southern Africa, principally in arid areas like the Kalahari.

The Fransie Pienaar Museum has photographs of rock paintings but is short on Khoi-San history. Rock paintings, which were done with ingredients like eland blood and egg white, depict elephants, eland and other animals as well as processions of hunters and other scenes of daily life. For those who have the time, there are a number of areas across South Africa where a visitor can see actual rock paintings, a prime location being the Cederberg mountain range two hours north of Cape Town. It has more than 500 painting sites, including a two-and-a-half mile rock-art trail and others accessible by hikers.

The rooms of the Pienaar museum chronicle the story of Prince Albert’s “founding” in 1762, a century after Dutch traders first came to this part of Africa, and are stuffed with 19th- and early-20th-century tools, dishware, telephones, typewriters, musical instruments, guns and other settler gadgets. After crossing the Karoo (a Khoisan word meaning desert) by wagon, the farmers Zacharias and Dina De Beer planted fruit orchards, vineyards and wheat fields. Other farmers followed and by 1855 the village could support a Dutch Reformed minister. A steepled church was built 10 years later, and it still dominates the village.