Date: 1913
Place: Rotorua
Media: watercolour on board
Dimensions: 384 × 274 mm
Catalogue number: 2023–1–18
Credit line: The Field Collection, Toi Mahara
The Black Scarf is thought to have been the last portrait Frances Hodgkins painted on her final trip home to New Zealand between 1912 and 1913, after which she stayed permanently In Europe. Her strong attraction to Māori women as subject matter had begun early in her work and continued after she had left New Zealand. She revisited Rotorua in March 2013 staying at the Lake House Hotel in Ohinemutu. In a letter to Will Field dated 1 March 1913 she wrote: ‘Luckily the weather is good so I am having two good goes a day sat the Maori, but have not yet got anything worthy of them. My hand and eye are out and I can’t get the colour a bit. I find them as fascinating as ever and if I lived in New Zealand I would settle alongside this sympathetic Lake—I love it. The Maori has a strong sense of race and ancestry about him, very interesting to feel and in this classic spot, Mokoia and the Lake as background it is quite easy to lose one’s heart to him.’ (Linda Gill, Letters of Frances Hodgkins, 1993, p269).