Painted in 1939, St Tropez, Farm Buildings and Harbour reflects Flora Scales’ deep engagement with the luminous southern French landscape she had come to know intimately during repeated summer visits throughout the 1930s.
Scales first visited St Tropez in the early 1930s, lodging at a pension, in the house of Madame Coccoz, 76 rue Sibilli, Place des Lices. She painted outdoors, inspired by the vivid Mediterranean light, the ochre and green tones of the land, and the rhythm of village life. She recalled the journey south by train in a letter to Linda Gill as most wonderful, describing the landscape as one where farmhouses rise straight out of the grapevines which are sometimes quite yellow.
During the 1931 season, Scales worked alongside fellow New Zealanders Frances Hodgkins, Maude Burge and Gwen Knight forming a creative network that shaped her development. It was during this period that she first encountered Edmund D. Kinzinger whose teaching, focused on colour, spatial structure and abstraction would prove pivotal to her later practice.
St Tropez, Farm Buildings and Harbour is a remarkable painting, rich in painterly confidence, expressive nuance and historical significance. It reflects the artistic freedom Scales found in southern France and her deepening engagement with European modernism. Strong formal elements and gestural brushwork combine to create a balanced, lyrical composition. It captures both the essence of a place and the broader modernist interest in form, light and structure. Like much of Scales’ work from this period St Tropez, Farm Buildings and Harbour reflects a personal, painterly response to environment, quietly modern and deeply felt.
