BC022
St Tropez
Scene of cultivated farmlands. Lower left two trees with pale brush strokes. Lower right bushy shape surrounded by pale brush strokes. Farm buildings diminishing in size on diagonal left to right. Rolling hills and mountains sweep around a bay of water at upper right half of canvas.
LL fine brown brush point St Tropez
LR brown brush point Flora Scales 1939
Verso framer's label
Private Collection
New Zealand
This painting belonged to Patience Tennent, the artist’s niece.
It is possible that this painting was brought back to New Zealand by Flora Scales's sister, Mrs Marjorie Hamersley, when she and her husband visited Scales in St Tropez in 1939 after the wedding of her daughter, Patience, in Malta.
This assumption is based on the fact that this painting, along with Mediterranean Village [BC019], Untitled [Basilica and Lighthouse, St Tropez] [BC020], Basilica and Lighthouse, St Tropez, Southern France [BC021], St Tropez [BC023] and Greniar [Graniers], St Tropez, Southern France [BC024], was safely in New Zealand by 1942 when Scales discovered the loss of potentially hundreds of artworks stored in Paris, plundered by Nazis. It is presumed the painting remains in a private collection in New Zealand.
View of foothills of the Massif des Maures and the cultivated farmlands inland from the coast.
The touches of pink and white paint and the lines of cultivated land refer back to earlier paintings such as Untitled [Stoke, Nelson] [BC013] and Untitled [Rural Scene] [BC125] from the early 1920s.
Flora Scales, The Suter Te Aratoi o Whakatū, Nelson, 2018, inside and opposite front cover (colour)