Frances Hodgkins Creating Space
Frances Hodgkins Creating Space
21 May–25 June 2025
Gow Langsford
28-36 Wellesley Street East, Auckland
Introduction
John Gow
'My aspect of the family talent, or curse? has taken the form of a deep intellectual experience a force which has given me no rest or peace but infinite joy & sometimes even rapture.'1
It was in 2019, the year which marked the 150th celebration of Hodgkins’ birth, that I walked into Tate Britain while visiting London on business. There, hanging on the feature wall of this enduring institution was Frances Hodgkins’ oil Wings Over Water, c.1932, which every visitor to the museum passed upon entering. Within those walls are so many art icons, from Rembrandt to Picasso, along with many of Hodgkins’ modern British contemporaries – Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, Christopher Wood, in fact all of the Seven & Five Society. Hodgkins’ good friends Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines were represented, along with works gifted by one of her major patrons, Lucy Wertheim.
Having relied so heavily on the works of Frances Hodgkins to underpin the viability of John Leech Gallery, a business I started working for alongside my parents in 1982, it was a significant moment to see the confirmation of her standing in the British art world hanging proudly in the Tate. I am sure that Hodgkins would have been pleased to think that, some forty years after her death, she was helping to support contemporary artists in Aotearoa through our gallery, and she would have been pleasantly surprised to see her lifetime commitment to her career endorsed by one of the most important art museums in the world.
This exhibition at Gow Langsford, Frances Hodgkins: Creating Space, is being launched close to 178 years after Hodgkins’ birth in Dunedin on the 28th April 1869. We are proud to present this catalogue in association with this major exhibition. Hodgkins’ father, William Mathew Hodgkins (1833-1898) was a practising artist and one of the city elders in Dunedin. He founded the Otago Arts Society, which started collecting art. Under his guidance, the first public art gallery in Aotearoa was founded, which is known today as the Dunedin Public Art Gallery. He actively encouraged both his daughters to paint. He thought that his elder
1. Letter from Frances Hodgkins to her brother, August 1940. The Complete Frances Hodgkins online
Right: Frances Mary Hodgkins, unknown photographer, c.1920, when the Hampstead Gallery, London, held an exhibition of her work. Ref: PAColl-5567. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand
daughter Isobel was very talented, and Frances, although a good watercolourist, was not in the same league. Little did he know that he lit a fire in Frances that would not be extinguished until her death in Dorset on the 13th May 1947.
Hodgkins’ lifelong determination to make art, to continue challenging the conventions of her perceived style, drove her to embed herself in the very heart of the art world in the United Kingdom and gain the respect of her peers and art critics alike. Always struggling for money, she relied heavily on her family, and in particular, on her friends and patrons in the UK. They saw her rare talent and backed her to continue her drive to make new and challenging works. Just as her audience would come to terms with one body of work, Hodgkins would push through a barrier and leap into a new, more challenging style. She was never complacent and was always excited about the next work she was going to create. This was endorsed in 1940 when Sir Kenneth Clark chose her to represent Great Britain at the 22nd Venice Biennale. The second world war interfered with the transport of artworks to Venice so it was held at Hertford House, London (The Wallace Collection) from May-June 1940.
Hodgkins has major collections of her work held in the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa and the Auckland Art Gallery Toi O Tāmaki. Her reputation is now well cemented as one of our most important artists of the 20th century. On the occasion of an exhibition of her work at John Leech Gallery in Remuera in the late 1980s, the contemporary artist John Reynolds came in to see the exhibition. We had a long discussion about her practice. John was drilling down into Hodgkins’ mark making, particularly in her gouache paintings. He was amazed that she was so inventive in the way she applied the medium, using the brush, the wooden end of the brush and what looked like her finger in places to achieve the desired composition of the work. He said he struggled to make marks like this today and was in awe of what she was creating fifty years prior.
Gow Langsford is honoured to be offering this collection of Hodgkins’ works for sale. The one oil, Still Life, c.1930, was painted while staying with her friends Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines at their home ‘The Pound’ in Sussex, and represents her practice in the oil medium at the height of her powers. When visiting this exhibition you will get to experience Hodgkins’ works in graphite, watercolour, gouache and oil. Travel with
her from Dordrecht to Dorset, over forty years of her practice, and see her continually striving towards a new visual language. From her signature oil, Still Life, to a gouache portrait of one of her most ardent collectors, Mrs Elizabeth Curtis, a landscape watercolour or gouache, you will experience Hodgkins’ work as if in a retrospective of her career highlights.
The Water Mill (detail), 1943. Work details pp. 46-47
Dutch Harbour Scene
1907 watercolour on paper
619 x 446mm
1010 x 820mm framed
Signed ‘F Hodgkins 07’ lower right
The Complete Frances Hodgkins Catalogue Number FH0470
Provenance
Don Cornes collection, Wellington, New Zealand
Private collection, Christchurch, New Zealand
Private collection, Auckland, New Zealand
Spring
1929
watercolour heightened with bodycolour on paper
567 x 592mm
860 x 885 x 60mm framed
Signed ‘F Hodgkins’ lower left
The Complete Frances Hodgkins Catalogue Number FH1326
Provenance
Private collection, Dr J. Mories Bassett, London, England
Exhibited
Frances Hodgkins and Vera Cunningham, Bloomsbury Gallery, London, England, November 1929
Revisiting Modernism, Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand, 27 September–14 October 2023
Literature
Linda Gill, ed., Letters of Frances Hodgkins (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1993) p. 419
The still life is an enduring subject matter that Hodgkins returned to throughout her career. Spring, 1929, features a softly blurred vision of a table full of fruit and flowers. Rendered mainly in pastels and subdued tones, the work has a subtle visual poetry that portrays Hodgkins’ knowledge and exploration of form and colour through watercolour. She has skilfully rendered the transparency of the glass vessels, showing how the application of pigment can be as effective in its absence, as in its presence. The resulting effect is ethereal, as though light is diffused across the paper’s surface.
Spring has been attributed to the year 1929, however, recent research suggests there are several stylistic similarities to the work Rosamond from c.1909 - possibly featuring the same table and vase. The signature, similarly, matches others from this period. Thus this still life Spring could be from c.1910. In this instance, the work may have been from a grouping of watercolours that Hodgkins hoped to send off to Paris in 1910. Hodgkins wrote in her letters, “the fear of death was upon me in case I couldn’t get them finished, having ordered frames etc…& now they are off to frame – (& fame) I hope.”1
Hodgkins had displayed a mastery of watercolours by this period, which was the catalyst for the beginning of her teaching career—in Paris in 1909 she won the American Club Prize, which offered an opportunity to have a studio to teach from. Not long after, she was asked to teach watercolour at Colarossi’s, the first woman ever to do so. After a year there, she opened her own teaching studio for women. Teaching became pertinent to Hodgkins’ survival as an independent female artist. She always placed it as secondary to her own artistic career, however she has been known to have left a real legacy to her students.2
Spring is a prime example of Hodgkins’ ability to balance structure and spontaneity. It captures a moment of quiet intimacy while also demonstrating her bold engagement with modernist techniques. This work stands as a testament to Hodgkins’ pivotal role in reshaping the boundaries of still life painting in the early 20th century.
Frances Hodgkins, Rosamond, c.1909, watercolour on paper, 509 x 553mm. The University of Melbourne Art Collection, gift of Dr Samuel Arthur Ewing, 1938
1. Linda Gill, ed., Letters of Frances Hodgkins (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1993), p. 255
2. Frances Hodgkins 1869-1947, Exhibition Catalogue (London: Whitford and Hughes, 1990), introduction.
Right: Revisiting Modernism, installation view, Gow Langsford Auckland City, 27 September–14 October 2023, photography by Sam Hartnett. Featuring Adele Younghusband, Magnolia, oil on board, 530 x 340mm/670 x 480mm framed
Still Life
c.1930 oil on canvas
662 x 558mm
855 x 760mm framed
Signed ‘Frances Hodgkins’ lower left; verso ‘FRANCES
HODGKINS’
The Complete Frances Hodgkins Catalogue Number FH0895
Provenance
St. George’s Gallery, London, England
Lucy Wertheim, London, England
Mr & Mrs Philippe Garner, executors of Lucy Wertheim’s estate, London, England, 1971
Private collection, Auckland, New Zealand
Private collection, Christchurch, New Zealand
Exhibited
Pictures by Frances Hodgkins, City of Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester, United Kingdom, 23 August–28 September 1947
An Exhibition of Pictures by Frances Hodgkins, Arts Council of Great Britain (Touring: Swanage, Bournemouth, Totnes, St Ives) March–May 1948
Famous British women artists: an exhibition of paintings and drawings in the Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield, United Kingdom, 1953
Frances Hodgkins, Works from Private Collections, Kirkcaldie & Stains Limited, Wellington, New Zealand, August 1989
Literature
Arthur R. Howell, Frances Hodgkins: Four Vital Years (London: Rockliff, 1951), p. 113
H. & A. Legatt, Frances Hodgkins, Works from Private Collections (Wellington: Kirkcaldie and Stains, 1989), p. 11 (ill. fig. 18)
Roger Collins and Iain Buchanan, Frances Hodgkins on Display 1890–1950 (Dunedin: Hocken Library, 2000), pp. 90, 92
Creating Space: Frances Hodgkins' Unique Vision
Mary Kisler
Frances Hodgkins first met British artists Arthur Lett-Haines and Cedric Morris in 1919 in St Ives. They formed a lasting friendship, underpinned by their shared determination to make their mark as modernist artists. Cedric and Lett, as he preferred to be called, came from relatively comfortable backgrounds, whereas Hodgkins struggled for most of her career—having had success in France before WWI, it took much longer to be recognised in conservative England—but she also needed to earn enough to survive. Cedric and Lett had similar struggles in getting their work recognised in the 1930s and ‘40s.
The two men were amongst a group of friends who provided a safety net for Frances until she began to make her reputation at the end of the 1920s. Cedric introduced Hodgkins to fellow painter Ben Nicholson and the Seven & Five Society, who invited her to show with them in March 1929. Thus began her rise to fame in England, where fellow artists and collectors alike were drawn to the individuality of her constantly evolving style, not least in her handling of colour, pattern, and form.
Frances had spent the Christmas of 1929 and the following spring in the south of France, where many of her watercolours and gouaches were infused with the wintery misty pinks and greys typical of the Alpes-Maritimes. She then returned briefly to London before moving to East Bergholt in Suffolk from late June to October 1930, renting Flatford Mill as her studio. The mill had been made famous when it appeared in John Constable’s paintings the previous century and was easily recognisable in the landscape. The half hour walk across the fields to the river Stour was soothing, but initially, interspersed with a few gently rolling hills and meandering rivers, they proved challenging subject matter after the crisp air and craggy peaks of St. Jeannet. Recognising that she must come to terms with the greens and browns of the English landscape, it was the vernacular architecture, with its combination
of brickwork, timber, lath, and plaster, often painted in white or pink, that proved her starting point.
Cedric and Lett lived not far away at Pound Farm, Higham, so they were regular visitors. Cedric drove Frances round the countryside in search of subject matter, often taking her back to their farmhouse as respite from her work. They had created the kind of milieu in which a somewhat eccentric but visionary middle-aged woman could thrive, where conversation was always lively, and where the three artists could discuss the latest exhibitions and critique each other’s work. Frances was amused by their somewhat raucous menagerie, which included Rubeo the macaw, in spite of its determined attempts to pluck off the red wig that she wore at the time, but who she preferred to Ptolemy the peacock, whose shrieks disturbed sleepers in the dead of night. The artists painted each other at various times, Frances including Rubeo in the somewhat brooding portrait she made of Cedric in 1930.1 By comparison, Cedric used a brighter palette that captured Frances’ colourful attire, startling wig and determined look in the famous portrait now owned by Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki.
A somewhat dilapidated, rambling building, the rear courtyard of the Pound provided the setting for Still Life, c.1930. It’s location is verified by one of Cedric’s own paintings, The Pound, Higham, Suffolk, which was depicted from the slight rise beyond the garden gate, looking back to the bright pink external plaster walls of the house which contrasted with the deep blue back door and its square glass panes.2 Equal attention was given to the flowering shrubs outside the wall as the courtyard itself, for Cedric was in the process of making his name as a remarkable gardener, his richly varied floral paintings demonstrating an intimate knowledge of botanical anatomy.
Frances, on the other hand, has selected the reverse view, focussing on the courtyard as setting, its low brick wall placed high on the picture plane, blocking out the grassy field rising beyond it. The artist has captured the patinated brickwork of wall, path, and courtyard, with only minimal attention to any plants growing within its confines. The view plays cleverly with space, for the open door on the left implies that the artist is seated inside the doorstep, while the scallop-edged folding tray table appears to stand on the bricked floor of the courtyard itself. Possibly reflecting a device she would have observed in the painting of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso when in Paris, the table is tilted up, its surface
Still Life, signature detail
Still Life, verso
Still Life, detail
covered with decorative items that would tumble into our space if really placed at such a precipitous angle. During that summer, Frances was frantically finishing work for an exhibition to be held at St. Georges Gallery in London, and it was the director Arthur Howell who suggested the title Still Life-Landscape for one of her works. This combining of two distinct genres was to become the focus of many of her paintings in the early 1930s.
From her early days trawling through the markets in France in the first decade of the 20th century, Frances had discovered that hand-decorated peasant earthenware, so tempting to the eye and hand, rarely survived the train journey to her next destination. Instead, she drew on those that came to hand, whether in the home of friends or on the mantlepieces and tabletops of her many lodging places. Here, a flowering begonia thrusting up from its sturdy earthenware pot stands next to a decorated earthenware jug, banded in white, which dances with rapidly painted abstracted green and brown figures. Nearer to the artist/viewer is a tilted Chinese bowl, allowing us to appreciate its delicate blue patterned interior. What may be a tin pedestal dish is lined with silver, its scalloped rim echoing the decorative edge of the tray on which it stands. Still Life seems to be another example of her ability to create a kind of reversal, where we are gently challenged to interpret the spaces she depicts, as she gradually reveals their secrets.
The distinctive brickwork in the courtyard can also be seen as part of the setting for The Painted Chest (Bangor University Collection), which also contains what art historian Linda Tyler believes is a deerskin rug with a green braided border.3 The same flecked surface is shown in Still Life, but here it takes on a more surreal aspect. Placed to the right of the table, the deep crease in the centre of the rug makes it appear as if it is draped over some kind of seat, the green braid trim curved out to suggest a possible leg of the chair, which seems to tangle with the outline of the tray itself. Hodgkins had painted several works that included an ornate sofa with two padded head rests belonging to Manchester friends in the mid-1920s. Her famous Self-portrait, still life, c.1935 also gradually reveals that her favourite items of clothing and accessories are clustered in the comforting embrace of an armchair, so it is not improbable that she is also playing some kind of visual game here.
One likes to think of Hodgkins and her friends sitting in the courtyard in the early summer evening, the seat turned to face the view, the folding table cleared to make room for whatever deli-
Frances Hodgkins, The Painted Chest, 1938, oil on canvas, 545 x 695mm, William Evans Bequest, Bangor University
cious snacks Lett had made to accompany their aperitifs. Good friends, watching the lengthening shadows creep across the brickwork, reflecting on the work of the day.
Still Life was held for many years in the personal collection of British gallerist, collector, and arts patron Lucy Wertheim, who donated 183 works to the Auckland Art Gallery in 1948. One of the topics much discussed by the three artists was the proposed name for the gallery being established in London by Wertheim, who was to include their work in her opening show later in 1930, and over the coming years. A regular visitor to Suffolk, it took some persuading for her to agree to use her own surname for the gallery, which Cedric, Lett, and Frances strongly encouraged her to adopt. More recently, this painting was also held in the personal collection of auctioneer Dunbar Sloane.
Cedric and Lett opened the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing in nearby Dedham in April 1937. The school burnt down in 1939, supposedly as a result of a casually flung cigarette butt by young pupil Lucien Freud. Cedric and Lett moved to Benton End, an old farmhouse large enough to accommodate themselves and friends, as well as serving as a new iteration of the art school. Bernard Brown, who visited for drawing classes at the tender age of six, recalls that Freud and Hodgkins, who was visiting in 1940, established a particular rapport, despite their difference in age. Frances had worked in Manchester in the mid-1920s as a fabric designer. She mischievously collaborated with Freud designing curtains to be hung at Benton End, the repeated motif of which showed a stylised house with flames leaping skyward!
1. Bequeathed to the Towner Art Gallery by Lucy Carrington Wertheim, December 1971. FH0901 https://completefranceshodgkins. com/objects/26306/portrait-ofcedric-morris
2. The courtyard is also illustrated in a real estate advertisement, clearly showing the linear brick path contrasting with horizontal bricks either side.
3. Although Bangor University has dated The Painted Chest as 1938, its subject suggests that it was also painted in 1930. A painted chest, although treated differently, also appears in a set of still life/ landscapes painted at Geoffrey Gorer’s cottage at Bradford-onTone, the same year.
Flowers in a Bowl
c.1930
watercolour on paper
635 x 485mm
1025 x 845 x 30mm framed
Signed ‘Frances Hodgkins’ lower left
The Complete Frances Hodgkins Catalogue Number FH1328
Provenance
Lucy Wertheim, England
Gifted by Lucy Wertheim to Dorothy Elmhirst, England, 1930 Dartington Hall Trust, Totnes, Devon, England. Bequeathed by Mrs Dorothy Elmhirst
There is a lyrical quality to Flowers in a Bowl, indicative of the ground changing approach to landscape and still life that marked out Frances Hodgkins’ paintings in 1930. The harmonious, mainly warm tones of the individual flowers (which look to be in an earthenware plant pot, rather than a bowl), have delicate washes indicating petals, while bolder lines outline each bloom in turn. The container sits on a table outdoors, a folded cloth hanging over the edge on the right, leading the eye down to the right foreground, while on the left, a small clump of flowers may or may not be growing directly in the ground. An overall translucent blue wash demarcates the background, from which emerge two dislocated curving forms suggesting low brick walls. In the background, the same blue lines suggest part of a terrace and an urn, which may well be a landing stage leading down to the river Stour. A single bare tree trunk to the left is similar to the cork trees she painted in the south of France.
Arthur Howell’s exhibition of Hodgkins’ work at St George’s Gallery in October 1930 was to make her name in England. Writing later of Hodgkins’ evolving style, he noted that artists who introduced certain forms of abstraction into their work desired the viewer to value what he termed ‘judgments of relation’, to focus on floating motifs in their own right, rather than simply seeing them as part of a more complex whole.1 These floating forms are also reminiscent of historical Japanese prints, where it is left to the viewer to fill in depth of field, rather than using gradated tones and perspective to lead the eye from one object to another in a landscape.
Hodgkins persuaded Arthur Howell to send several paintings to Lucy Wertheim for the latter’s opening exhibition at the Wertheim Gallery, also held in October 1930. Flowers in a Bowl wasn’t part of the final selection, as Wertheim gifted it to Dorothy Elmhirst, a wealthy American socialite who became famous in England as a radical educationalist. She and her English husband Leonard Elmhirst set up the progressive Dartington School in 1925 in South Devon, an institution that eschewed traditional academic subjects in favour of the arts and agronomy. At the school’s core, Dartington Hall is a ravishingly beautiful medieval structure, which in the 20th century ultimately boasted a renowned collection of British modernist art.
R.
Four Vital Years (London: Rockcliff, 1951), p. 48
1. Arthur
Howell,
Text by Mary Kisler
Dartington Hall and gardens, 2014. Courtesy of Mary Kisler
Narcissus and Fruit
c.1931
charcoal on paper
464 x 362mm
825 x 720 x 35mm framed
Signed
‘Frances Hodgkins’ lower right. Inscribed under mount ‘Narcissus & Fruit’
The Complete Frances Hodgkins Catalogue Number FH0951
Provenance
Mrs Dorothy Elmhirst, purchased from The Lefevre Gallery, London, England, 1946
Dartington Hall Trust, Totnes, Devon, England. Donated by Mrs Dorothy Elmhirst in 1965
Exhibited
New Watercolour Drawings, The Lefevre Gallery, London, England, October–November 1933
Gouaches and Pencil Drawings, The Lefevre Gallery, London, England, April 1940
Frances Hodgkins: Retrospective Exhibition, The Lefevre Gallery, London, England, November 1946
Frances Hodgkins 1869–1947: A Centenary Exhibition, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, Auckland, Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council of New Zealand, 1969 (Touring: Dunedin Public Art Gallery; Robert McDougall Art Gallery, Christchurch; National Art Gallery, Wellington; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Commonwealth Institute Gallery, London, February 1970)
Frances Hodgkins: The Late Work, Minories Art Gallery, Colchester, England, 1990–1991 (Touring: Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne, January–March; Oriel 31, Davies Memorial Gallery, Newton, March–April; Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield, April–June 1991)
Literature
Frances Hodgkins Retrospective Exhibition, Exhibition Catalogue, (London: The Lefevre Gallery, 1946), p. 13 (ill.)
Arthur R. Howell, Frances Hodgkins: Four Vital Years (London: Rockliff, 1951) pp. 102, 118, 120, 125
Ian Roberts and David Armitage, Frances Hodgkins 1869 – 1947: A Centenary Exhibition, Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council of New Zealand (Auckland: Auckland Art Gallery, 1969) (ill. fig. 68)
Richard Stokes, Frances Hodgkins - The Late Work (Colchester: The Victor Batte-Lay Trust, 1990) (ill. p. 43)
Roger Collins and Iain Buchanan, Frances Hodgkins on Display 1890–1950 (Dunedin: Hocken Library, 2000) pp. 68, 77, 89
Narcissus and Fruit is one of a number of nocturnes that Hodgkins produced around 1931. As a member of the Seven & Five Society Hodgkins became acquainted with Ben and Winifred Nicholson, Ivon Hitchens, and Barbara Hepworth. Her work started to reflect concerns of the group which included, amongst others, challenging traditional artistic norms and celebrating the essence of a medium. We see this in Hodgkins’ sophisticated use of charcoal in Narcissus and Fruit, where she displays deft skill in creating both luminosity and depth with the medium. The work was one of four pencil drawings selected to form part of a solo exhibition at The Lefevre Gallery in 1933, alongside a series of watercolours.
In keeping with still life tradition, Hodgkins’ vase of Narcissi and the bowl of fruit sit arranged upon a table, with the fruit foreshortened, thus displaying the contents of the bowl. The title of the work is descriptive but leaves room for speculation about a connection to the Greek youth Narcissus, who legend tells fell in love with his own reflection. In versions of the tale, Narcissus is turned into a flower by the Gods after his death. The buds at the forefront of Hodgkins vase droop, a suggestion of the tradition of memento mori in an otherwise abundant still life scene.
Narcissus and Fruit, verso
Landscape Ibiza
c.1933
watercolour on paper
370 x 500mm
660 x 790 x 30mm framed
Signed
‘Frances Hodgkins’ lower centre; inscribed lower right: ‘Landscape Ibiza’
Frances Hodgkins Catalogue Number FH1042
Provenance
Originally acquired May 1941
By descent to Mrs D. Ogilvie, Dundry, England
John Leech Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand
Private collection
Exhibited
Artists of Fame and of Promise, Summer Exhibition of Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture, Second Part, The Leicester Galleries, Leicester Square, London (Ernest Brown & Phillips., Ltd.), England, 1941
Six Contemporary British Painters, Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham, England, 21 October 1950–19 November 1950
Literature
Roger Collins and Iain Buchanan, Frances Hodgkins on Display 1890–1950 (Dunedin: Hocken Library, 2000) pp. 79, 97
Portrait of Mrs Elizabeth
Curtis
1939
charcoal and watercolour on paper
527 x 393mm
790 x 635mm framed
Signed ‘Frances Hodgkins 1939’ lower centre
Frances Hodgkins Catalogue Number FH1161
Provenance
Acquired by Elizabeth Curtis from Frances Hodgkins
By descent to Dunstan Curtis, Powys, Wales
Phillips, London, England, June 1989
Private collection, Auckland, New Zealand
Exhibited
Frances Hodgkins: Retrospective Exhibition, The Lefevre Gallery, London, England, November 1946
Revisiting Modernism, Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand, 27 September–14 October 2023
Literature
Arthur R. Howell, Frances Hodgkins: Four Vital Years (London: Rockliff, 1951), p. 101
Roger Collins and Iain Buchanan, Frances Hodgkins on Display 1890–1950 (Dunedin: Hocken Library, 2000) p. 88
1. Letter to Dorothy Selby, 21 Nov 1940, Croft. Linda Gill, ed., Letters of Frances Hodgkins (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1993), p. 508
2. Letter to Dorothy Selby, 09 Dec 1939, Studio, Corfe Castle, Dorset. The Complete Frances Hodgkins online
3. Mary Kisler, “The Path to Fame: Discovering England 1932-1947,” in Frances Hodgkins: European Journeys, eds. Catherine Hammond and Mary Kisler (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2019), p. 193
Left: Revisiting Modernism, installation view, Gow Langsford Auckland City, 27 September–14 October 2023, photography by Sam Hartnett. Featuring Rita Angus, Hugh Spencer, 1963, oil on canvas board, 408 x 288mm/463 x 343mm framed
Mrs Elizabeth Curtis was great a supporter of Frances Hodgkins and was an avid collector of her work. She was the headmistress and sole proprietor of a progressive boarding school for girls called Langford Grove from 1923 until 1962, which had a focus on music, literature and the arts. Hodgkins described Mrs Curtis as ‘gorgeous’ and as having a ‘towering personality.’1 In a letter to Dorothy Selby in 1939, Hodgkins writes of Mrs Curtis, ‘[she] looked like a duchess, a rather theatrical one with a fashionable hat set at quite the wrong angle on masses of auburn hair. I longed to paint her & some day must. A mustard coloured frock & leopard skin to crown all. She really was marvellous & every 2nd word or so was superlative. I thoroughly enjoyed her visit.’2
In Portrait of Mrs Elizabeth Curtis, Hodgkins uses fluid, confident strokes to describe Mrs Curtis. There is a feeling of quiet, self-assurance in the subject with closed eyes and a distinctive violet hat. She is portrayed in the same manner as the orchids that sit on a surface before her, though space beyond this distinction is compounded. Figure and form are foremost, both imbued with a quiet vitality.
In 1945, Hodgkins was included in a group exhibition at The Lefevre Gallery in London, along with Henry Moore, Matthew Smith, Graham Sutherland and Francis Bacon, an exhibition which ‘earned her overwhelming accolades.’3 Portrait of Mrs Elizabeth Curtis was included in a subsequent retrospective exhibition at The Lefevre Gallery in 1946, at which point Hodgkins was highly regarded as a visionary, and leading modernist of her time.
Wild Violets and Honesty
1941
gouache on paper
432 x 584mm
735 x 875mm framed
Signed
‘Frances Hodgkins 1941’ lower right
The Complete Frances Hodgkins Catalogue Number FH1192
Provenance
Collection of Mrs W. J. Turner, England
Collection of Professor J.B. du Toit, South Africa
Private collection, United States of America
John Leech Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand
Private collection, Auckland, New Zealand
Exhibited
Modern French Pictures and Contemporary English Art, The Leicester Galleries, London, England, January 1942
London Group, R.B.A. Galleries, London, England, May–June 1947
Homage to Frances Hodgkins, St George’s Gallery, London, England, March–April 1949
British Modernism, John Leech Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand, 2006
Frances Hodgkins: Paintings, Gouaches and Drawings, John Leech Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand, 2010
Literature
Myfanwy Evans, The Penguin Modern Painters, Frances Hodgkins, Ed. Sir Kenneth Clark (United Kingdom: Penquin Books, 1948) (ill. pl. 23)
Arthur R. Howell, Frances Hodgkins: Four Vital Years (London: Rockliff, 1951), p. 129
Roger Collins and Iain Buchanan, Frances Hodgkins on Display 1890–1950 (Dunedin: Hocken Library, 2000), pp. 81, 90, 95
Frances Hodgkins, exhibition catalogue (Auckland: John Leech Gallery, 2010), pp. 16-19
Frances Hodgkins: Paintings, Gouaches and Drawings, 26 March-17
April 2010, John Leech Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand
Kitchen Range
1942
gouache on paper
445 x 487mm
771 x 796mm framed
Signed ‘Frances Hodgkins 1942’ lower left
The Complete Frances Hodgkins Catalogue Number FH1220
Provenance
Redfern Gallery, London, England, 1965
Private collection, Auckland, New Zealand
Exhibited
Gouaches by Frances Hodgkins: A New Series of Gouaches Painted During 1942-1943, The Lefevre Gallery, London, England, March–April 1943
Homage to Frances Hodgkins, St George’s Gallery, London, England, March–April 1949
Frances Hodgkins: Kapiti Treasures, Mahara Gallery, Waikanae, New Zealand, February–May 2010
Literature
R. D. J. Collins, Hodgkins ‘97: Papers From the Symposium Held at the University of Otago, 4-6 April 1997, to Mark the 50th Anniversary of Frances Hodgkins’s Death, Hocken Library, (Dunedin: University of Otago, 1998), p. 120 (ill.)
Joanne Drayton, Frances Hodgkins: A Private Viewing (Auckland: Godwit, 2005), p. 261 (ill.)
Janet Bayly, Frances Hodgkins: Kapiti Treasures (Waikanae: Mahara Gallery, 2010), p. 39 (ill. pl. 27)
Abandoned Cottage, Cerne
Abbas No. 2
1943
gouache on paper
340 x 460mm
770 x 875mm framed
Signed
‘Frances Hodgkins 1943’ lower left
The Complete Frances Hodgkins Catalogue Number FH1235
Provenance
Dorothy Jane Saunders, Warminster, Wiltshire, England
Miss A. M. (Elizabeth) Shaw, England
John Leech Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand
Private collection Wellington, New Zealand
Private collection, Auckland, New Zealand
Exhibited
Pictures by Frances Hodgkins, City of Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester, United Kingdom, 23 August–28 September 1947 (as Deserted Cottage near Corfe)
An Exhibition of Pictures by Frances Hodgkins, Arts Council of Great Britain (Touring: Swanage, Bournemouth, Totnes, St. Ives) March–May 1948 (as Abandoned Cottage)
Literature
Roger Collins and Iain Buchanan, Frances Hodgkins on Display 1890–1950 (Dunedin: Hocken Library, 2000) p. 91 (Deserted Cottage), p. 93 (Abandoned Cottage)
Linda Gill, ed., Letters of Frances Hodgkins (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1993) (ill. pl. 10)
Arthur R. Howell, Frances Hodgkins: Four Vital Years (London: Rockliff, 1951) pp. 111, 127, 128
Iain Buchanan, Michael Dunn, Elizabeth Eastmond, Frances Hodgkins: Paintings and Drawings (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1994), p. 78 (ill. fig. 62)
1. Letter to her brother Willie Hodgkins, Corfe Castle, July 5th 1943. The Complete Frances Hodgkins online
2. Mary Kisler, “The Path to Fame: Discovering England 1932-1947,” in Frances Hodgkins European Journeys, eds. Catherine Hammond and Mary Kisler (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2019), p. 185
Hodgkins spent much of the last years of her life in Dorset. In 1943, much to her dismay, rumbling tank movements through her village caused the roof of her studio to collapse. She writes “Without warning of any kind the roof of my poor old Studio did a slide into the courtyard below happily with no injury to self or pictures but with great inconvenience. You never saw such a mess in your life.”1 As a result, Hodgkins went to stay with her close friend Dorothy Selby at Cerne Abbas in the autumn of 1943.
In Abandoned Cottage, Cerne Abbas No. 2, 1943, a brown cottage stands on the edge of a pond, reflected upon its mirrored surface. The sky is alive with suggestions of clouds, as is the landscape with fluid trees. Another dwelling is depicted on the right, its soft haze and scale indicating that it is in the nearby distance. The painting is atmospheric, with the deep blues and oranges indicating a changing of light, perhaps twilight or dawn. Hodgkins is less concerned with the accuracies of form, instead creating a painting where colour, shape and line blend to suggest the atmosphere of the English countryside.
Post-war, Hodgkins repeatedly painted dilapidated structures within English landscapes, a subject matter often depicted in British Neo-Romanticism as a metaphor for the tortured English psyche during the war, though Hodgkins’ treatment of the subject focused more on painterly possibilities. During her time in Cerne Abbas, Hodgkins sketched various landscapes and motifs, subsequently painting from memory so that she could concentrate on form and composition without being confined by the detail in the landscape. Reconstructing landscapes from memory allowed her total control over colour, fusing motif and landscape together in a blurring of representation and abstraction. The result has a dream-like quality, reminiscent of Marc Chagall.
Gouache, denser than watercolour with a chalky texture, allowed Hodgkins to manipulate her surfaces, contrasting pigments against one another to great effect. Mary Kisler writes that Hodgkins “ultimately embraced the charm of rural communities in Britain, peopling her landscapes with the flotsam and jetsam found in farmyards, fields and foreshore.”2 The idea of flotsam and jetsam reflects Hodgkins’ fluidity of her brushwork and form, with gouache becoming her preferred medium towards the end of her life.
The Water Mill
1943
gouache on paper
505 x 385mm
775 x 655mm framed
Signed
‘Frances Hodgkins 1943’ lower left; original handwritten label attached verso, inscribed: ‘Water Mill by Frances Hodgkins lent by Jane Saunders, 12 Victoria Road, Fallowfield, MCc.’
The Complete Frances Hodgkins Catalogue Number FH1233
Provenance
Collection of Miss Dorothy Jane Saunders, United Kingdom
Thence by descent
Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand
Private collection, Auckland, New Zealand
Exhibited
Pictures by Frances Hodgkins, City of Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester, United Kingdom, 23 August–8 September 1947
Spring Catalogue, Gow Langsford Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand, 2011
Literature
Arthur R. Howell, Frances Hodgkins: Four Vital Years (London: Rockliff, 1951), p. 110 (listing Jane Saunders as the owner), No. 34 p. 127
Mary Kisler, Finding Frances Hodgkins (Auckland: Massey University Press, 2019), p. 365 (ill. fig. 73)
Roger Collins and Iain Buchanan, Frances Hodgkins on Display 1890–1950 (Dunedin: Hocken Library, 2000), pp. 82, 91
Farm Pond
1943
gouache on paper
470 x 665mm
925 x 1100 mm framed
Signed ‘Frances Hodgkins 1943’ lower right
The Complete Frances Hodgkins Catalogue Number FH1230
Provenance
Prof. Peter Millard, purchased from the Crane Kalman Gallery, London, England, 1967
Sotheby’s, London, England
McArthur and Co. Fine Art Auction, Auckland, New Zealand
Private collection, Auckland, New Zealand
Private collection, San Francisco, United States of America
Exhibited
Frances Hodgkins 1869 - 1947: A Centenary Exhibition, Auckland Art Gallery, Auckland, Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council of New Zealand, 1969 (Touring: Dunedin Public Art Gallery; Robert McDougall Art Gallery, Christchurch; National Art Gallery, Wellington; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; Commonwealth Institute Gallery, London, February 1970)
Manufacturing Meaning: the Victoria University of Wellington art collection in context,Wellington, New Zealand, September 1999–January 2000
Literature
Leo Bensemann, Barbara Brooke, Ascent: A Journal of the Arts in New Zealand: Frances Hodgkins, Commemorative Issue, Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council of New Zealand, (Christchurch: Caxton Press, 1969) p. 72 (Ill.)
Ian Roberts and David Armitage, Frances Hodgkins 1869–1947: A Centenary Exhibition, Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council of New Zealand (Auckland: Auckland Art Gallery, 1969) (ill. fig. 97)
GOW LANGSFORD
Published in 2025 by Gow Langsford on the occasion of the exhibition Frances Hodgkins: Creating Space, 21 May–25 June 2025 at Gow Langsford Auckland City. ISBN: 978-1-99-115784-3
With thanks to Jonathan Gooderham for his extensive research. The Complete Frances Hodgkins Catalogue is a comprehensive online resource, accessible at https://completefranceshodgkins.com/
Text by Mary Kisler and John Gow, along with Imogen Cahill, Madi Macdonald and Hannah Valentine for Gow Langsford Design by Hannah Valentine for Gow Langsford Print Management by INC Productions, Aotearoa New Zealand
Copyright © Frances Hodgkins, authors and Gow Langsford 2025 All rights reserved
This book is copyright. Except for the purpose of fair review, no part may be stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including reading or storage in any information retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. No reproduction may be made unless a licence has been obtained from the publisher or its agent.
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