Anemones

Title and first date supplied by the artist for Auckland City Art Gallery, New Zealand, exhibition, Helen F V Scales, 1975-1976. Listed as artwork no. 30 in this exhibition. Second date taken from Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington, documentation.

Medium taken from Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington, New Zealand, documentation. Publication The Back of the Painting: Secrets and stories from art conservation (Waters, Linda, Sarah Hillary and Jenny Sherman, Te Papa Press, Wellington, New Zealand, pg 180) describes the medium as oil on cardboard.

First and second verso inscriptions are directly on the unframed painting board and were documented by B. de Lange at Toss Woollaston’s home in Riwaka, New Zealand, late 1980s. The number 30 denotes the artworks number in the exhibition Helen F V Scales, Auckland City Art Gallery, New Zealand, 1975-1976. The third and fourth verso inscriptions were taken from the framed backing mat board and documented by B. de Lange at Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington, 2019.

Pale vase resembles that used in Mimosa and Fruit [BC050] from similar time.

Documentation given to B. de Lange by Mark Stocker, Curator Historical International Art, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington, reads, “A semi-abstract painting of red, purple and white flowers in a white vase, against a backdrop of white, pink and yellow.

M.T. Woollaston bought this painting from Scales's 1975 exhibition, which was organised in part by Colin McCahon. Forty years earlier, Scales had been key in shaping Woollaston's development, providing him with lessons from her time at the Hans Hofmann [School] in Munich.

While Te Papa has a work from Scales's late period, it is a landscape and not as immediately appealing as this painting. That, and its provenance, make it an important addition to the collection.”

Stocker in conversation with B. de Lange, 03.05.2019, “…she was a Modernist with conviction.”

Excerpt from Toss Woollaston's essay for B. de Lange, 1992, “When I saw the 1973 [sic, 1975] exhibition of her work at the Peter McLeavey Gallery in Wellington I revised my estimation of her as an inveterate student. The pictures were all small, beautiful and sensitive evidences of an artist’s personality. Nobody else could have painted them. I would dearly have liked to acquire one or both of her self-portraits with the head tilted to one side not only laterally but in depth, so that your vision moved with it in deep space – but they were gone before I got to the exhibition. I bought a picture of anemones instead – the one I found I remembered best after a day or two. It is still as beautiful as when I bought it.”

Excerpt from Toss Woollaston’s A Grievous Error, Unpublished Autobiographical Notes (Museum of New Zealand Tongarewa, Wellington, New Zealand, reg. no. CA000062/001/0002, chapter 10, pg 126), on his purchase of Anemones, “I have never regretted it. All her sensitiveness and appreciation of life is there, the hovering vibrancy of the stroke that hesitates to alight – but, when it does, alights faultlessly. I wish I could paint like that."

Jennifer Twist, librarian, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, correspondence with B. de Lange, 25.06.2015, says these notes are thought to be one of Woollaston’s attempts to rewrite Sage Tea: An Autobiography (Collins, Auckland, New Zealand, 1980) in which he acknowledges his mistaken report of Scales’s death in his 1960 lecture to Friends of the Auckland City Art Gallery, New Zealand.