Frances Hodgkins

(New Zealand, 28/04/1869 - 13/05/1947)

Loveday and Ann: Two Women with a Basket of Flowers (1915)

Arguably New Zealand’s leading avant-garde artist, Hodgkins’s colourful hybrid of landscape and still-lifes reflects the myriad changes she saw during her life, from the Impressionist upheaval of artistic tradition, to the invention of the aeroplane, to the chaos of two World Wars.

In 1886, at just 17 years old, Hodgkins exhibited her work for the first time at an exhibition by the Otago Art Society, which was quickly followed by exhibitions at the Canterbury and Auckland art societies and the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts. In 1890 she was elected a working member of the Otago Art Society and was later awarded the silver medal for figure study. That same year, she sent her work to be assessed by the South Kensington Department of Science and Art, for which she received first-class passes in both the elementary and advanced stages.

Hodgkins talent was recognised almost immediately on her arrival in Europe in 1901, when she attempted to take private classes with Norman Garstin but, she wrote to her mother, ‘he seems to think I have nothing to learn which is absurd and any help he gives me he says is merely from one brother artist to another’.

After settling in England in 1913, she began to move away from her previously Post-Impressionist style and began to combine still life and landscape genres, for which she is now famous, integrating foreground and background into a landscape that suggested the dream worlds of Surrealism, without ever integrating Surrealist motifs, instead, her canvases lean towards Fauve and Expressionist pictorial influences. Throughout this change her subject matter remained the same with streets and people, especially women and children, featuring prominently in her new Modernist paintings. Her success culminated with an invitation to exhibit with the Seven and Five Society in 1929.

With a career spanning 56 years Hodgkins was one of the foremost artists of her generation and one of the leaders of the avant-garde movement. In 1948, a year after her death, she was the subject of a publication in the Penguin Modern Painters series.

Image: Frances Hodgkins, Loveday and Ann: Two Women with a Basket of Flowers (1915). Oil on canvas, 67.3 x 67.3 cm. Tate, U.K.