To Isabel Field from F.H., 6 November 1901, Hotel du Forum, Arles, S. Rhone

...this stall (the butcher's) is flanked by the poulterer on the left who is always in a cloud of feathers and distressed cackling and gurgling from the strangling victims.

Market scenes formed the staple element of Frances Hodgkins’ output on her first northern hemisphere trip that began in April 1901 and ended with her return to New Zealand in December 1903. In the small towns visited by the peripatetic artist during that exciting time, the market-place offered both the picturesque and the everyday, on which she built an appealing variant of the ‘peasant-painting’ trend popular since the 1880s in both England and France. The New Zealand audience was already primed by artists with whom she might have compared herself, such as Charles Worsley. At the annual regional exhibitions, the subject was purveyed in numerous Continental variations to spectators inclined towards a positive if sentimental view of rural and small-town life and ‘the old ways’ that urbanisation was at that point in time rudely undercutting.

Hodgkins visited the southern city of Arles on her very first foray into France, after the Irish painter Norman Garstin had introduced her and her travelling companion, the artist Dorothy Richmond, to Normandy and Paris. Travelling by train, they were seeking warmer weather as the northern summer turned to autumn. In about a month spent in Arles, Hodgkins produced a good deal of work that shows how rapidly she was maturing in her use of the medium, her compositional instincts, and her ability to capture character and expression. As the artist wrote home to her mother, “It is all ever so nice here, quite what I want and plenty of stuff to paint for months to come ... it is a land of enchantment you can’t help painting, everything and everybody is a picture”. Possible motifs abounded: she mentions vineyards, canals, washerwomen on the riverbank and Roman remains as well as the infinitely stimulating market.

While the location of Hodgkins’ market scenes is not always identified, those whose titles specify that they were made in this historic town suggest the range of motifs available there. They include La Place, Arles (Hocken Library, Dunedin), A busy Corner in Arles (Harris Museum and Art Gallery, Preston), Waiting for a Customer, Arles (whereabouts unknown) and The Vegetable Stall, Arles (unidentified).

By this time, Hodgkins had already amassed a number of market scenes, such as Breton Pottery, and she was to make many more over the next twelve months in San Remo, Italy and Dinan, Brittany. The present work was probably not meant for exhibition but, on this small scale, was more likely to have been a sketch made on the spot intended to serve as the model for a larger, more finished watercolour painted after the event. It is a close relation to the study made on the same scale called Geese and Ducks for Sale (McCormick no. 144), sold at auction in this country in November 1986. The principal difference is in the background, where the artist has substituted the wall of a building for the dense crowd seen here. There are likely to have been more in this suite of studies, the others yet to come to light.

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Written by Pamela Gerrish Nunn

To Rachel Hodgkins, 26 August 1901. Hotel de France, Caudebec en Caux, France.

It is very beautiful country all around this neighbourhood and the peasants are a real joy…. some of the old men wear such beautiful blue corduroy bags that make me ache to paint them, it is a great sight to see them on Market day (every Saturday) the whole town is covered with little canvas booths and with the different goods displayed and the babel of noise that goes on, each stallholder crying up their own particular wares.

Frances Hodgkins left New Zealand for the first time in February 1901, and from July that year spent five months in France, joining the painting classes of Penzance-based Norman Garstin at Caudebec-en-Caux. It was here that she met and made friends with English artists Maud Nickalls, Mrs Ashington, Peter Moffat Linder, Norman Garstin and his wife, and Auckland-born Dorothy Kate Richmond. These painting classes enabled her to immerse herself in her art for the first time, without the distractions of family, domesticity and teaching obligations. However, she needed to supplement her modest savings with sales, and assuming that everyday life in turn-of- the-century rural France would appeal to New Zealand buyers, she sought suitable subject matter in the open countryside and towns. Subsequently all these paintings came back for exhibition in New Zealand.

They were produced en plein air and rapidly, as reflected in the fluidity of her brushwork, capturing a sense of the colour, action and informality of village life. But such an approach was not without its challenges, for Hodgkins was mindful that a lady artist at an easel in the market-place was guaranteed to attract comment and the curiosity of the locals.

To Isabel Field, 15 September 1901; from Frances Hodgkins, 21 Av. de la Grande Armée, Paris:

Tomorrow I am off to a place called Les Andelys about 60 miles from Paris where Miss Nickalls is to join me for a fortnight. If we report very favourably on it Mr. Garstin will most likely join us and I will wait there for Miss Richmond.

Some three weeks later Hodgkins wrote to her mother from Arles, mentioning her time in Les Andelys. As planned, Dorothy Kate Richmond had joined her, and the pair were now en route to Italy.

To Rachel Hodgkins, 9 October 1901; from Frances Hodgkins, Hotel du Forum, Arles, Bouches du Rhone, France:

Les A.[ndelys] proved a capital sketching ground and three weeks didnt half exhaust its beauties … but the cold weather drove us South. Miss Nickalls & Mr. Garstin joined me there and we were a very merry party and it was a very happy wind up to our summer’s sketching.

Calves for Sale, Les Andelys, Normandy depicts a farmer in blue - perhaps the ‘beautiful blue corduroy bags’ Hodgkins referred to in the letter to her mother of 26 August 1901 – examining a pen of animals in the foreground. Using her rapid wet-on-wet technique she captured the general atmosphere of the scene, in particular the patchwork of colour and activity in the background. The following year Hodgkins reflected on ‘those market scenes’, describing them as the outcome of ‘great mental strain, with nerves at a tension & eyes bewildered with an ever moving crowd …’

In August 1902 Hodgkins exhibited 37 watercolours of France at the McGregor Wright gallery, Wellington, and three months later several of her watercolours painted at Les Andelys, and also Dinan in Brittany were shown at the Otago Art Society.6 Her market scenes are represented in the permanent collections of the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Auckland Art Gallery and the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.

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Written by Richard Wolfe
Research by Jonathan Gooderham

Frances Hodgkins first sailed from New Zealand for Europe in 1901. Arriving in London in April of that year, Hodgkins joined Norman Garstin (1847 – 1926) on his summer sketching trips in France, spending 1901 in Caudebec and 1902 in Dinan.

It was during her time in Caudebec with Garstin that Hodgkins completed the present painting, which clearly shows the beginnings of Hodgkins’ interest in the French movement of Impressionism with its focus on naturalism and the observation of the effects of light on form. It is well documented that on her arrival in London in 1901, Hodgkins was disappointed with the majority of art that she saw being exhibited, with the exception of John Singer Sargent (1856 – 1925) and the Newlyn School of painters. Hodgkins was very appreciative of Sargent’s work, whose technique she exclaimed meant that, ‘You stand back and behold meaningless blobs shape themselves into the most perfect modelling and form.’

The present painting features an elderly woman knitting and shows clear traces of Hodgkins’ focus on the Impressionist approach to painting. The light streaming through the windows is seen to dissolve portions of the framing, while the costume of the woman, her hands and her knitting is translated through a flurry of brushstrokes that provide solidity and form, but not intricate detail. It is these techniques that strengthen and develop in her later paintings to characterise her unique approach to modernism.

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Written by Jonathan Gooderham

To Isabel Field, 30 September 1902. Patisserie Taffatz, Rue de l’Apport, Dinan.

Those market scenes are the outcome of great mental strain, with nerves at a tension & eyes bewildered with an ever moving crowd & ones senses all alert & linx eyed for effects & relations one thing to another.

Between 1901 and 1903, during her first trip to Europe, Frances Hodgkins joined the Penzance-based artist Norman Garstin’s sketching classes in Caudebec-en-Caux in 1901 and Dinan in 1902. There she met and befriended fellow artists; Maud Nickalls, Mrs Ashington, Peter Moffat Linder and Norman Garstin and his wife. Partaking in the art school afforded Hodgkins, for the first time, the opportunity to immerse herself in her art, unhampered by the distractions of family, friends, domestic life and teaching.

Her paintings from this period reveal her interest in the local street scenes of villages such as Caudebec, Honfleur and Dinan. Frances Hodgkins believed that in order to sell works she had to extend her repertoire to include en plein air paintings. She assumed that this technique would attract more buyers for her works, thus, on her first trip to France she ventured into the open countryside and local markets to capture these vibrant locations.

Her letters contain many references to the difficulties of painting out of doors. She felt that a lady artist at work in small town market places excited local curiosity and comment. These difficulties added their own unique influence to Hodgkins’s work. A rapid fluidity in her brushwork is visible in her watercolours of this period; as if she was trying to capture a multitude of colours, light configurations, shadows and people in a single swift brushstroke.

The present watercolour, Mother and Daughter Preparing Flowers from 1901/2, features a mother and child at a market stall, enlivened by the vibrant colours of the market place. Manipulating the wet-on-wet painting technique, Hodgkins cloaks the figures in an air of mystery as she leaves their forms undefined and offers only the briefest of allusions to the identity of a peasant mother and child. Between 1902 and 1903, Frances Hodgkins painted numerous watercolour scenes of the market stalls in Dinan and Arles, which she subsequently sent back to New Zealand for exhibition. Similar paintings to the present piece are held in the permanent collections of Theomin Gallery, Dunedin, the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, the Auckland Art Gallery and the Museum of New Zealand: Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington.

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Written by Jonathan Gooderham

To Rachel Hodgkins, 28th July 1902; from F.H., Rue de l’Apport, Dinan

The French are early birds and the streets just as busy then, in fact busier than later in the day. Dinan is a first rate place - a variety of everything - old streets, peasant women, fruit stalls, river scenery, feudal castles & two “dashing” cavalry regiments ... I am sending out next week all I had for the November show which leaves me with an empty portfolio and it will be several months before I can hope to get some decent work together again.

Frances Hodgkins made her first trip to Britain in 1901, reaching London on 7th April. The following month she attended classes at the London Polytechnic and at the end of June, joined a summer sketching class in Caudebec en Caux in the Normandy region of northern France, led by Irish-born and Penzance-based artist Norman Garstin (1847-1926). Hodgkins subsequently visited Paris and Italy, and returned to London in late February 1902. By now people were pouring into the capital, in preparation for the forthcoming Coronation of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra. Everywhere there was a sense of excitement but, as Joanne Drayton notes, Hodgkins had tired of cosmopolitan life, and the crowds and atmosphere of London ‘weighed on her’. She yearned for the ‘simpler country life’ and, as shortage of money was now a growing problem, she made plans to join another of Norman Garstin’s summer schools in Dinan, Brittany, in the northwest of France.

Dinan is an attractive and well-preserved small town dating from medieval times. Hodgkins arrived there around 7th July 1902, and although the weather was generally wet, she managed to paint most days. The marketplace was a recurring subject in Hodgkins's work of this period. It was a motif established in her practice by Garstin, who had introduced his sketching class to the market scene as a primary source of inspiration. According to Pamela Gerrish Nunn; ‘The marketplace lent itself to the capture of the essence of locality because it was generally the centre of public activities, combining the ritual and traditional with the spontaneous and unpredictable’. Hodgkins captured the lively market scenes, focussing on specific produce – fish, pottery, livestock, flowers - in her compositions, typically in a recurrent size of 36cm by 26cm size.

With the arrival in Dinan of New Zealand friend Dorothy Kate Richmond (1861-1935), Hodgkins was encouraged to remain in Europe. The two artists spent time working together, their paintings permeated with what Drayton describes as an ‘end-of-summer golden glow’, and also showing signs of the winter to come. Hodgkins left Dinan in October and returned to London, which she described in a letter to her mother as a ‘giddy vortex … all is rush, bustle, dirt, fog, rain, fag, busses and fusses’

On the basis of titled works, and in particular those mentioning Dinan, Hodgkins spent a productive time in Brittany. Her watercolour Breton Pottery is dominated by the rear three-quarter view of a seated vendor, with a large selection of her variously coloured wares – mainly green, blue and shades of brown – arranged on the cobbled market-place in the foreground. Two other background figures, who appear to be in traditional Breton dress, add to the sense of market activity, as does the artist’s vigorous technique. The painting is also distinguished by the economical application of pigment, while the inclusion of large areas bleached by strong light and the lack of oblique shadows capture the market under the heat of the mid-day sun.

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Written by Richard Wolfe
Research by Jonathan Gooderham

From Frances Hodgkins to Rachel Hodgkins, 28th July 1902, Rue de l’Apport, Dinan

“I have been very industrious and up at 6 & out working by 7.30. The French are such early birds and the streets just as busy then, in fact busier than later in the day. Dinan is a first rate place – A variety of everything – old streets, peasant women, fruit stalls, river scenery, feudal castles & two “dashing” cavalry regiments … I am sending out next week all I had for the November show which leaves me with an empty portfolio and it will be several months before I can hope to get some decent works together again.”

Market scenes were the essential element of Frances Hodgkins’ first trip to Europe between 1901 and 1903. Living in the villages of Brittany in close proximity to the cafés and markets she carried small, easily portable watercolour sketching pads and paints enabling her to capture the picturesque vibrancy of village life en plein air.

Frances Hodgkins left New Zealand for the first time in February 1901 and from July that year spent five months in France, joining the painting classes of Penzance-based Norman Garstin at Caudebec-en-Caux. It was here that she met and made friends with English artists Maud Nickalls, Mrs Ashington, Peter Moffat Linder, Norman Garstin and his wife, and Auckland-born Dorothy Kate Richmond.

In 1902 she once again joined Garstin’s classes in Dinan, Brittany, arriving in the midst of a three week festival. These painting classes enabled her to immerse herself in her art for the first time, without the distractions of family, domesticity and teaching obligations. However, she needed to supplement her modest savings with sales, and assuming that everyday life in turn-of-the-century rural France would appeal to New Zealand buyers, she sought suitable subject matter in the open countryside and towns. Subsequently the majority of these paintings were sent for exhibition in New Zealand.

Hodgkins’ market scenes were produced rapidly en plein air, as reflected in the fluidity of her ‘wet-on-wet’ brushwork, capturing a sense of the colour, action and informality of village life. But such an approach was not without its challenges, for Hodgkins was mindful that a female artist at an easel in the market-place was guaranteed to attract comment and the curiosity of the locals.

Writing to Isabel Field in September 1902 Hodgkins complained that “the market scenes are the outcome of great mental strain with nerves at a tension and eyes bewildered with an ever-moving crowd” and notes the necessity to remain alert to the effect and relations of one thing to another.

A Street Market in Brittany depicts a typical farmers market, most probably Dinan, with the emphasis on the market stall holder sitting patiently on her stool in the hot sun dressed in the costume of the period, a blue corset dress and white calico bonnet. Her unshaded barrow du marché displays cheese. A man in his ‘whites’, most likely a butcher, stands at another stall in the middle distance with a hint of the market square trees in the background. Both figures wearing similar costumes are also evident in two 1902 watercolours, In the Meat Market, Dinan (FH0368, Private Collection) and Marketing, Dinan (FH0451, Aigantighe Art Gallery, Timaru) both of which were exhibited at the Otago Art Society in 1902.

Hodgkins sent watercolours of Dinan to her sister Isabel for exhibition in New Zealand in 1902 and was unhappy with the prices Isabel sold them for at McGregor Wrights Gallery in Wellington. “I did not know whether to laugh or cry when I got your letter … Of course I am touched & proud that they have sold so well, but was it wise dear to let them go for so little? A lump rises in my throat when I think of 12 pictures selling for £40.” She suggested Isabel ask higher prices in the November 1902 Otago Art Society exhibition in Dunedin to help recoup expenses from her recent travels in Europe.

Hodgkins’ market scenes are represented in the permanent collections of the Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki and the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.

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Written by Jonathan Gooderham

Whilst Frances Hodgkins was living overseas, she often 'lamented' that not enough 'Maori studies' had been brought back to Europe with her, as she felt that the subject matter had caught on, and the public had taken a general interest in the life and culture of the Maori People. In many of the letters addressed to her mother, she said 'that when I arrive back in New Zealand I will begin to collect some 'genuine native studies'.

Preparing food at a Maori Village, Rotorua is dated 1905, an uncertain year for Hodgkins. Having just returned to New Zealand, she found it difficult to settle as her engagement to the American T.W Wilby had been broken off that year and her planned trip back to Europe delayed. So in June 1905, with the company of her friend Dorothy Kate Richmond, she took off for a long 'sketching holiday' in Rotorua. They stayed at The Lake House which gave them a closer insight into how the Maori lived. From there she reported to her mother 'we have managed to get two models already and have spent a busy day.' She wrote with a note of wry self-mockery how she hoped to renew her youth in the hotel's hot pools. Hodgkins was still in Rotorua during July when she received news that her work had been hung in The Royal Academy, London.

Her watercolour Head of a Maori girl was also executed during this trip to Rotorua in 1905, but very few other works with Maori as subject have actually been recorded.

The present painting, Preparing food at a Maori Village, Rotorua, is a rare, finished watercolour and is notable as it indicates her strong interest in Maori culture. The composition is much more elaborate and the work more resolved than her earlier Maori sketches that focus on women and children, and implies that although Hodgkins was an outsider, she was also an astute observer with an obvious empathy for the traditional Maori way of life.

To Rachel Hodgkins, c. 8th September 1907; from F.H., Pennock’s Hotel, Dordrecht

I’ve sold a £5 picture this morning to a departing tourist and what with my teaching fees I am quite in funds. The Editor of the local paper is reported to have said that there were 42 ladies making pictures of Dordrecht but only one artist. Modesty forbids me mentioning names …

In mid-1903, and in addition to exhibiting at the Royal Academy, Frances Hodgkins showed ten works with the Fine Art Society in Bond Street, London. She also made her first trip to Holland where she spent some ten weeks. In early November she sailed from London, making her first return visit to New Zealand, staying with family in Wellington and continuing to exhibit with this country’s art societies. On 18th January 1906 she departed from Wellington for Plymouth, and a little over a month later left England for Venice, then travelling to Paris, Avignon and Antibes. In late May 1907 she undertook her second trip to Holland and, apart from a return visit to see friends in England in November/December, she remained in Holland for the next fifteen months, until 23 August 1908.

One of several paintings resulting from Hodgkins’s two visits to Holland was 'Boys Fishing'. One of its three subjects sits cross-legged on the approaches to a bridge, engrossed in what he is doing, while the two others lean against the rails behind, watching. The trio and the bridge itself are presented simply and directly, with minimal attention to detail, as in the vigorous brushstrokes which define the clumps of trees framing the composition. Apart from the orange roof near the centre of the composition, there is a restrained use of colour in this quiet and contemplative scene, capturing the sense of three young friends lost in their thoughts.

During the time of Hodgkins’s visit, Holland, like Concarneau in Brittany, was a popular location for artists. They were attracted by those regions’ traditional and rural qualities, which were in sharp contrast to the rapid industrialisation then taking place in the cities of Europe. The three young subjects of Boys Fishing are wearing traditional Dutch caps and clogs and reflect Hodgkins’s awareness of the work of British artist Stanhope Forbes (1857-1947), a leading member of the artists’ group at Newlyn, the small Cornish fishing village which she had first visited in 1902. Newlyn had been selected as an English equivalent to the artist colonies established on the Continent. Its artists were the leading pioneers of plein air painting in Britain, finding the mild climate conducive to outdoor work, and also drawn to depicting scenes of village life based on the observation of nature. Irish-born Norman Garstin (1847-1926), a leading member of the Newlyn artists, introduced Hodgkins to such themes, as realised in her paintings at Concarneau and elsewhere in France and Holland.

Hodgkins was earning a respectable living taking students in Holland and the present painting was a gift to one of those students, Theresa Thorp, “the congenial and specially selected companion” with whom Hodgkins travelled to Paris in 1908.

The bridges of Holland appeared in other paintings by Hodgkins, including the earlier 'The Oude, Delft', from 1903, showing a similar small structure over a canal, with a girl in long dress, Dutch cap and clogs, carrying a basket. This painting was included in the artist’s joint exhibition with Dorothy K. Richmond at McGregor Wright Gallery in Wellington, in February 1904. The Evening Post described The Oude, Delft as a ‘brilliant picture’, ‘full of harmonious, yet glittering, colour, the vivid reflections of unseen objects in the water beyond the bridge being full of subtle suggestion’. Hodgkins was in New Zealand at the time, and the paper suggested that the country should welcome back a painter who ‘has gone so far and will, undoubtedly, go further’.

In July 1905 Hodgkins exhibited three watercolours at the Auckland Society of Arts. On this occasion a reviewer noted that she had ‘found her metier’ while working in Holland and considered 'The Oude, Delft' ‘one of the most important works in the gallery’. Particularly impressive was the treatment of the ‘sluggish waters of the old canal lined with well-trimmed plane trees’, and ‘the quaint Dutch folk passing along the quay or over the bridge’. By late February the following year Hodgkins was back in Europe, and from late May 1907 she would spend some ten months based in Dordrecht in the west of Holland. One painting resulting from this stay, 'Dordrecht' (Dunedin Public Art Gallery), c.1908, captures the sense of a grey wet day, and with four children in traditional Dutch clothing in the foreground, with the impressive architecture of the town beyond.

Written by Jonathan Gooderham & Richard Wolfe

To Rachel Hodgkins, 11 February 1908. Dordrecht, Netherlands.

There has been a lovely pink barge in the canal in front of my window & I have been painting it. I sent Pete, the waiter, over to find out how long it was going to remain & to tell the Captain I was painting it & to stop as long as he conveniently could. The Captain, much pleased, ran up a little Dutch flag & saluted me at the window.

Frances Hodgkins left London for Dordrecht, in Holland, towards the end of May 1907. On the boat over she discovered her old Caudebec acquaintance Moffatt Linder, who was based in St Ives but came to Dordrecht twice a year to a year to paint.

They parted company in Dordrecht, but agreed to meet later. Frances had advertised for art pupils in London and hoped to gather a group of five. Two students joined her at her Pennock's Hotel and she set about finding suitable images of the town and its people to paint.

Her watercolour,Dordrecht, contains many of the elements she would have been looking for. The painting with its muted colours, reflecting the wet overcast day, has a certain liveliness. The light glistens on wet surfaces and plays off puddles, the canal and clouds, thereby activating the rust and dark hues, the forest greens and the vivid touches of ultramarine blue that are used sparingly throughout the composition.

Teaching brought with it its own challenges. One of her pupils became ill and had to return to England and while she gained one or two more students, her costs were barely covered. She did, however, make the aquitance of Dutch painter, Evert Moll, who lived in Dordrecht but also painted in London and Paris. Frances accompanied Moll on several painting excursions.