Provenance: Collection of the Artist's family

Illustrated: p 77 Rhona Haszard An Experimental Expatriate New Zealand Artist, Joanne Drayton, Canterbury University Press, 2002

Exhibited: Rhona Haszard: An Experimental Expatriate Artist, Hocken Library Touring Exhibition, 2002

During Rhona Haszard's short life she distinguished herself as a 'New Woman' whose social and sexual behaviour was highly controversial. She worked as an artist on the Channel Island of Sark, in France, Alexandria and London. She dressed eccentrically, recommended Radclyffe Hall's lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness, spoke positively of de facto relationships and advocated vegetarianism and unprocessed food. Most significantly, she wanted to paint innovatively and professionally.

Rhona was born in Thames in 1901, and her family lived in Auckland, Christchurch, Hokitika and Invercargill before, at age eighteen, she enrolled at Canterbury College School of Art, to work with fellow students Ngaio Marsh, Evelyn Page, Rata Lovell-Smith and Olivia Spencer Bower. Even in this talented company Rhona established a promising reputation. A successful future seemed assured by her marriage in 1922 to Ronald McKenzie, but her traumatic elopement with Englishman Leslie Greener seemed to threaten all.

In 1926 the couple escaped to France, where her manner of painting changed. A brighter, Post-Impressionist style rapidly brought international recognition. Her work was hung in the Paris Salon of 1927, and in London she participated in a number of significant exhibitions. In Cairo she was shown at the Galerie Paul, and in Alexandria she had a survey exhibition, and a final show that opened the night before her shocking death at the age of thirty.