Finistère

This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).

In 1926 Rhona Haszard and her artist husband Leslie Greener spent time in Brittany, where this marinescape was painted. In early summer, they took a boat from the Channel Island of Sark to the French port of St Malo, and began a tour of Brittany. It was a well-known French holiday destination: a main attraction was the area’s coastline, which is one of the longest and most magnificent in Europe. In the 1880s it was the haunt of artists, traditional and avant-garde, and at Pont-Aven of post-impressionists Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh.

The couple stayed and painted first in the fishing town of Concarneau, and then at Camaret. These settlements have long gained their livelihood from the sea, and among the routines of local life were the coming and going of tunny boats, and the unloading and marketing of fish. Haszard painted views of Concarneau and Camaret Harbours, and this coastal view of the département of Finistère was probably painted on the journey between the two. Painted from a high vantage point, the canvas offers a cleverly composed vista between rocky outcrops, fishing boats in sail and a high horizon line. Rocks are angular, simplified and painted in a mosaic-like patchwork of pure colour that defines their form. Haszard’s palette is a dazzling combination of creamy-purple, pink and violet, juxtaposed with complementary green. Her brushwork activates the surface with rich impasto paint, which is applied in areas of thick velvety texture.

Haszard was evolving a bright, decorative, post-impressionist style of painting. Her talent and stylistic innovation brought international recognition when the similarly composed Sardine fleet, Brittany, 1926 (Suter Art Gallery Te Aratoi o Whakatū, Nelson), was hung in the Paris Salon of 1927. Haszard’s work was picked up by overseas critics and created a sensation when it was exhibited in New Zealand. Glowing responses were published in papers such as the London Daily Mail, the Egyptian Gazette, the Auckland Star and the Waihi Telegraph, which observed: ‘New Zealanders who have gone abroad have made good in many walks of life, but few have gained prominence as artists, and of these perhaps none in recent years has claimed the commendation of leading art critics in greater measure than [Rhona Haszard]’.1

Joanne Drayton 

1 ‘New Zealand artist honoured: Pictures for British Legion Exhibition: Rhona Haszard’s work’, Waihi Telegraph, 5 July 1930, p. 3.