Roy de Maistre was an innovative colourist. Stemming from his own personal experience as a musician and an artist, he presented a colour/music keyboard equating a seven colour spectrum to seven octaves. View from a North Shore Garden, Pymble illustrates how de Maistre’s colour work informed his painting both in terms of composition and palette. By uniting the ideas of colour and composition (both in terms of music and art) from his earlier experiments to more formal imagery, de Maistre succeeds in capturing the emotional essence of the Pymble scene.

The present work had a personal connection for Ruth Prowse. During the Great Depression her family moved from the countryside to live in Pymble, Sydney. Ruth attended the Presbyterian Ladies College, in the grounds of which de Maistre had painted. A smaller version of the present work painted in the same year is held in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales.