Untitled

Alternative title, Pink Tree and Village, taken from the exhibition Flora Scales at The Suter Te Aratoi o Whakatū, Nelson, New Zealand, 2018.

Purchased and originally owned by Betty Gordon, a friend of Flora Scales, from the private exhibition of Scales’s works held at the home of Mrs Joan Williams, Havelock North, 1974.

Likely to have been painted in the spring of 1932 as evidenced by the pink blossom of the trees. To date it is not clear whether or when Scales was in St Tropez in 1932. Scales was known to be in New Zealand by June that year. Shipping notes report her leaving England late in April. The journey from France (Marseille or Paris) to New Zealand typically lasted five to seven weeks.

Various sources record that Scales had returned to New Zealand for “several months,” making it unlikely that she would have been back in St Tropez by September, before starting at the Hans Hofmann School of Fine Arts in Munich, Germany, by 14 October. It is known that Hans Hofmann's summer school in St Tropez took place over the months of July to September, and that, in 1932, the School was under the directorship of E.D. Kinzinger. But it is unlikely that Scales spent time with him that year.

Scales, in conversation with Janet Paul, Rotorua, New Zealand, 1979, noted, “I would spend 3 months in Paris and 3 months in Saint-Tropez until 1932,” suggesting that, had she been in St Tropez in 1932, it would most likely have been the months leading up to her departure for New Zealand.

Scales could have possibly brought this painting with her on this journey from France to New Zealand.

The exact location of the scene depicted in this painting is open to conjecture as there are no recognisable landmarks to act as guides. However, based on a mix of visual evidence such as the cube like architecture, the bright clear light, the almond and cypress trees, and palette of ochres, lavender, blue, and green, it seems reasonable to attribute this painting to the south of France. 

In this painting Scales seems to affirm her move away from conventional landscape construction. She is experimenting with ways of bringing the deep prospect of the landscape to the flat picture plane without recourse to linear perspective. This is demonstrated particularly by the unifying bands and blocks of colour of similar values. 

Scales described the delight of travelling south to St Tropez by train in the 1930s to Linda Gill, 27.08.1976, “...most wonderful landscape…the farmhouses are pink and they rise straight out of the grapevines which are sometimes quite yellow.”

A few years earlier the English painter Vanessa Bell had also described the dramatic contrast between Northern Europe and the South of France, and the joy of living and working in the "Midi", in a letter to her sister, Virginia Woolf, 05.02.1927, “Painting is a different thing here from what it can be in the winter in England. It’s never dark even when the sky is grey. The light...is perfect and even now one could often work out of doors, if one wanted to. It makes such a difference to be sure one won’t be suddenly held up in the middle of something by fog or darkness. Also the beauty is a constant delight. The people are very friendly and helpful and living is very cheap...it seems more and more ridiculous for painters to spend half their lives in the dark.” – excerpt from Spalding, Frances, Vanessa Bell: Portrait of the Bloomsbury Artist, Tauris Parke Paperbacks, London, England, 2016, pg 216