“It could be wished that Miss Flora Scales had given the same care to all the details of her very clever picture, ‘The Valley Road’ (7), that she has bestowed on most of them. In many respects this is certainly one of the best pictures in the exhibition: The figure of the girl, the cows and the landscape generally are admirable. They are drawn with vigour, and the brilliant light is very well managed. But why those unfortunate trees on the left? They might have been well enough in an impressionist sketch, but as it is they are wholly “out of the picture.” It would have been quite possible, and legitimate, to paint them broadly without making them mere flat-slabs of colour. There is no accounting, or excuse, for such an eccentricity in a picture which otherwise possesses great charm.”
BC139
The Valley Road
Rural landscape. Back view of young woman wearing a hat and pinafore. She holds a stick in her left hand and follows two cows with right flank showing. A row of poplars at left. Path winds towards distant hills.
Unknown
Unknown
This is a reproduction of The Valley Road [BC139] in the Canterbury Society of Arts Annual Exhibition Catalogue, Christchurch, New Zealand, 1919 [see Related images]. Exact date unknown, dated according to the catalogue accompanying the Canterbury Society of Arts exhibition. It was catalogued as follows: The Valley Road, oil, no. 7, 20 x 16, £10.10.0. This is the only image recorded of this work, its location is unknown.
In three of Scales’s early 1920s landscape paintings, Untitled [Landscape with curved road and trees] [BC121], Untitled [Nelson Farm Landscape] [BC127] and The Valley Road [BC139], a wide curved road leads deep into the middle distance on a strong left to right diagonal implying by its curve an eventual return towards the centre of the composition to balance the two point perspective, in keeping with the conventions of landscape painting in New Zealand at that time.
Canterbury Society of Arts Catalogue, Christchurch, New Zealand, 1919, plate 7
The Press, 12 April 1919, pp 2-3
Image courtesy Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, New Zealand, Canterbury Society of Arts Catalogue 1919, Christchurch, plate 7, https://christchurchartgallery.org.nz/media/uploads/2010_08/CSA_Catalogue_1919.pdf
