Provenance:

Purchased from John Leech Gallery, Auckland 1985, Fletcher Trust Collection

Exhibited:

Daily Express, Young Artist's Exhibition, original label affixed verso, Rhona Haszard, An Experimental Expatriate, Hocken Library Touring Exhibition 2002

Illustrated:

p. 59 Rhona Haszard, An Experimental Expatriate New Zealand Artist Joanne Drayton, Canterbury University Press, 2002

Born in Thames on the Coromandel Peninsula in 1901, Haszard studied at Canterbury College School of Art and worked with fellow students Ngaio Marsh, Evelyn Page, Rata Lovell-Smith and Olivia Spencer Bower. She was taught by Archibald Nicoll, the newly appointed head of the school. A successful future seemed assured by her marriage in 1922 to teacher and fellow student Ronald McKenzie. However in 1925 she abandoned her marriage and headed to France with ex-British army officer and artist Leslie Greener. They settled in Paris and studied at the Academy Julian. Her brighter, Post-Impressionist style rapidly brought international recognition, and in London she participated in a number of significant exhibitions. She worked as an artist on the Channel Island of Sark, 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.

Her life was cut short at the age of thirty when she fell off a four-storey tower at Victoria College, Alexandria in 1931, the night after her last exhibition opened.