St Maxime

Original owner Patience Tennent, the artist’s niece. First and second titles according to inscriptions. The second verso in Tennent’s hand recording information sent back to New Zealand with the painting. Third title, Overlooking Med Harbour, taken from the exhibition Flora Scales at The Suter Te Aratoi o Whakatū, Nelson, New Zealand, 2018.

The signature and date in blue brush point lower left, reading Flora Scales 1932 3, and the overpainted darker blue, reading Flora Scales 1932, are possibly both retrospective, added when Scales gave or sent the painting to her niece Patience Tennent.

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.

The 1933 dating of Untitled [Green Tree and Basilica, St Tropez] [BC135] supplies evidence that Flora Scales returned to paint in St Tropez between mid-June and late-September that year, between the time she finished at the Hofmann School on 10 June, and when she left London to sail to New Zealand on 29 September. She could have brought the painting with her on this journey. During this time, E.D. Kinzinger taught Summer School in Murnau, Bavaria, Germany.

It is presumed that it was in June 1933, when Scales concluded her studies at the Hofmann School, that Kinzinger gave Scales an untitled pencil drawing dated 1932 [see Related artworks]. Scales in conversation with B. de Lange, 1983, “when he said goodbye forever.”

This is a close view of La Pesquière, the fishermen's landing stage on the eastern side of Plage de la Ponche, the fishing harbour of St Tropez, France. The landing stage is also seen in Untitled [Mediterranean Scene] 2 [BC017]. Scales is painting from above the landing stage looking across the gulf to Ste Maxime which is directly north and twenty-five minutes by ferry from La Pesquière. Scales explained her choice of a high viewpoint in order: “to grasp the subject in one moment - the moment of seeing it and then, step-by-step, you see more, more is revealed.”

Letter from Hélène Riboty, Archives communales de Saint-Tropez, France, to Gérard Dubosson, researcher, Nelson, New Zealand, 03.04.2020, “[This] seems to me painted from one end of the place du révelin, one sees la plage de la ponche (and la pesquière) which was the port of the fishermen of Saint-Tropez.”

While in St Tropez, France, Scales met New Zealand artists Frances Hodgkins and Gwen Knight [see Timeline 1931]. Flora Scales in conversation with M. de Lange, 1984, said that Gwen Knight had also painted this scene which she vividly remembered. Gwen Knight, Frances Hodgkins, Maude Burge and May Smith went to Ibiza at the end of 1932. Frances Hodgkins was there for six months, Gwen Knight stayed for six years. Scales recalled, “There were men with their nets spread out to dry on a huge concrete landing stage. It was always draughty. There was a little beach and tall houses and a clothesline with sailors' trousers and a vine with bright green leaves. I sat with my work on my lap and my bag was beside me – cats played around me, jumping into my bag.”

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