Margaret Stoddart's name is synonymous with flower painting in New Zealand. Yet her ability took her beyond this genre alone. She was a professional, in all senses of that word, and such was her talent that she absorbed the tenets of the Impressionist style which is reflected here and in a landscape being offered, The Oaks, Canterbury Homestead (Lot 62).In her flower painting, and in her landscapes, Stoddart maintained the importance of expressing the impression, the broad effect, rather than the mere representation, of nature.

Stoddart's Roses is indeed not a replication of nature but her own singular interpretation of the roses rendered with rhythm and definite structure. On the right hand side she has deliberately used outline and a slightly more geometric form to give solidity to the soft pink roses while the red roses on the left, with their more vibrant colour, are rendered in calligraphic swirls to create the colour mass. This variety of brushwork creates an animated feel and the depth of the colour, even when soft, is strengthened by the juxtaposing of the primary colours of blue and red.

There is a soft diagonal moving gently upwards from the left to the right reinforced by the abstract dusty mauve-pink shadow which is a combination of blue and pink of the right hand bowl. The loose square shape of the shadow at the top right is reflected in the square created on the left by the blue bowl and its reflection. The right hand reflection, in contrast to this, has a more rounded feel, in keeping with its softer tones.

It is a lyrical, poetic, interpretation of her much beloved flower.

Angela Mackie (Ashford)

As well as being Margaret's favourite floral motif throughout her life, the rose has been described in New Zealand gardening history as the plant that was held 'in the greatest esteem in the earliest decades of this century'. It enjoyed enormous prestige throughout the country and especially in Christchurch, which took an early lead in nineteenth-century rose growing. (This may have been related to the loyalty the city felt towards its English origins).

p 81 Flowers into Landscape Margaret Stoddart 1865 - 1934, Julie King, Hazard Press,1997