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This distinctive and fashionable sun visor belonged to the artist Flora Scales. She wore it when painting outdoors ('en plein air').
Helen Flora Victoria Scales was born in Lower Hutt in 1887. She started training as an artist at 16, before travelling to England to study at Frank Calderon's school of animal painting in 1908. After returning to New Zealand Scales continued to paint, exhibiting her work with the Academy of Fine Arts in Wellington.
Scales’ father died in 1928, leaving her an inheritance that allowed her to become a full-time artist. She travelled initially to Paris, before enrolling at Hans Hofmann’s modernist school of art in Munich in the winter of 1931-32. Scales was hugely influenced by Hofmann’s painting theories, which informed her practice for the rest of her life and make her a distinct figure in the history of New Zealand modernism.
Scales returned briefly to New Zealand in 1934 – while living in the Nelson region she shared Hofmann’s ideas with a young Toss Woollaston, who was strongly influenced by them. Finding the New Zealand art world conservative and generally unreceptive to her work, Scales left for Europe again in the late 1935 or early 1936. She spent most of the rest of her life living and working in Europe, before returning to Auckland in 1972.
Alongside this sun visor, Te Papa also holds Flora Scales’ artist smock, paint box and easel (GH018017, CA000215). These objects are unusual everyday survivals, offering a fascinating glimpse into the daily work of being an artist. The high-necked smock is marked with paint and oil from brushes wiped across its cotton surface. The palette is coated in fields of dried paint, in colours familiar from Scales’ finished canvasses. The wooden box, bought from a top Paris art supplier, is full of half used tubes of oil paint (cadmium red, burnt sienna, viridian green) and fat brushes. Working outside, ‘en plein air’, was key to Scales’ painting technique. Worn to protect her skin and eyes from sun and paint, this visor is a wonderful record of her ways of working.