Untitled

Purchased by current owner in Cremorne, Sydney, Australia, early 1980s.

This is the old town of St Tropez, France. The church is L’Eglise Notre-Dame de l’Assomption.

This painting supplies evidence that Flora Scales returned to paint in St Tropez between mid-June and late-September 1933, between the time she finished at the Hofmann School of Fine Arts in Munich, Germany, 10 June, and the date she left London to sail to New Zealand, 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.

This work relates to two undated paintings by Scales, Untitled [Mediterranean Scene] I [BC016] and Untitled [Mediterranean Scene] 2 [BC017] which are among the earliest of her South of France studies.

To paint this landscape Scales has envisioned the scene tipped upright rather than laid out before her. Her high viewpoint accentuates the flatness this achieves. By means of contrast in shape, colour and gesture Scales creates pictorial space according to Hans Hofmann's insistence that space on the two-dimensional picture surface be created solely by the manipulation of the artists' materials without recourse to perspectival prescriptions.

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