To Rachel Hodgkins, 21 December 1920. Cassis, nr. Marseilles, France.

The place (Cassis) is off the beaten track, not very far from Marseilles, on the coast, much frequented by artists on account of the landscape…Winston Churchill his wife and suite have been here lately, he for a fortnights painting.

After leaving New Zealand in 1901, the first group of monochromatic works that appear in Hodgkins’s oeuvre are related to Cassis, where she spent six weeks during the winter of 1920-21. Hodgkins’s drawings from this period were completed in black chalk and were of uniform size. Two examples of her chalk drawings are currently held in public galleries; Cassis c.1920 - 1930 in the Auckland City Art Gallery and Landscape in the South of France in the Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester.

Frances Hodgkins left England for France in 1920. On her arrival, she immersed herself in the local culture, enjoying the fine French food and wine. After a week of relaxation she moved south to the small town of Cassis, in the hope of meeting up with close friends, Cedric Morris and Lett Haines. Arriving in the small fishing port, Hodgkins discovered that they had already departed, but the magnificent amphitheatre created by the hills surrounding Cassis drew her in, and she decided to stay. By chance, Hodgkins met a fellow New Zealander, Jean Campbell, and joined her on her vineyard, Fontcreuse. There she enjoyed daily walks over the rugged hills of the region and sketched constantly as she went. This, Hodgkins realised, was Cézanne country - a challenge that she met in a series of black chalk drawings, which are notable for their boldness and strength of design - in what was for her, a new medium.

Hodgkins’s chalk works express her assuredness in her own skill and reveal an element of experimentation in terms of both subject matter and form. Hodgkins intended her chalk drawings to not be just picturesque examples of the local landscape and people, but to be autonomous artworks that would also serve as inspiration for larger paintings. They were undoubtedly popular and the present drawing, Cassis Quarryman and Wife c. 1921, bares a strikingly close resemblance to her later work, Spanish Husband and Wife c.1925. Hodgkins hoped to sell the set of chalk drawings in London, writing to her mother Rachel on the 4th of February 1921 to say that she was:

…sending off my Cassis set of drawings to Mr Frank Rutter to see if he can arrange to show them in London…

Cassis Quarryman and Wife is executed with a paucity of line that underscores Hodgkins’s masterful draughtsmanship. In the present work and the related piece, Spanish Husband and Wife, held in the Auckland Art Gallery, Hodgkins utilises the chequered patterning of the fabric to draw attention to the female figures and to provide a central anchor for the composition. The use of bold patches of shading works to accentuate the landscape of the faces while Hodgkins’s ability to indicate spatial recession by hinting at the layering of the couple is testament to her skill and understanding of the fundamentals of the drawing practice.

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Written by Grace Alty & Jonathan Gooderham
Edited by Jemma Field

To Rachel Hodgkins, 13 January 1922. Studio, St Lawrence’s St, Burford, Oxon.

…[The Studio] is a lovely old barn. I have bought 8 old chairs for 10/-… an old counter for a table, an iron bedstead & various adjuncts including a black kitten, young of Mrs. Plosh of Park Farm, Barrington. It takes plenty of nerve to climb my ladder – a handrail will be necessary if visitors are not to break the neck in the semi-darkness of a winter afternoon.... No more now Dearest. It is too cold. You must walk seven miles at least if you want to get thawed – so I am off – I go [in] the afternoon round by Grt. Barrington by the low road & back by the High.

In 1922 Frances Hodgkins moved to the Cotswolds town of Burford about twenty miles from Oxford. There she rented a lovely old barn, which was to serve both as a studio and her living quarters. She was determined to make the barn into a ‘Hodgkins centre’, where pupils could rally round and immerse themselves in art. At the same time she could not believe that she was settling down again in England after shaking its dust off her feet only a year before.

Hodgkins continued to hold regular art classes and students soon flocked to the small town of Burford. Hodgkins related her experience of teaching to her close friends, Jane Saunders and Hannah Ritchie in a letter written from her studio on the 24th of June 1922:

Burford is a deadly place for stranded artists when it rains. I have had them all very heavily on my chest. A friend living at Taynton, 1 1/2 miles away, has let me have the run of her house & garden while she is in London – so we have been tramping out there in the wet with our lunch & tea & painting flowers – of every description – a lovely rose garden with torrents of blossom from every tree.

The present watercolour, Burford High Street, Oxfordshire c. 1922, is a clear example of Hodgkins’s mature style, which she had developed by the 1920s. The naturalistic element is still present, but she has shifted her attention to focus on the reality of the picture plane, which takes precedence over the creation of a three-dimensional illusion. As such, the landscape has been completely flattened and divided into clear segments of contrasting colour. The success of the painting lies in Hodgkins’s mastery of subtle shifts in chromatic tonalities and the use of a fluid, gestural line, which works to unify the composition and to provide a harmonious balance.

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Written by Grace Alty & Jonathan Gooderham
Edited by Jemma Field

To Dorothy Selby, 26 April 1923. Studio, St.Lawrence’s Street, Burford, Oxon.

I shall be most pleased to give you some coaching in the summer, or as soon after May 14th as you like. My Season starts then. My terms are 4 guineas a month a course of 12 demonstration lessons, or I can give you the course in a shorter time if desirable . . .

The Auckland Art Gallery holds a collection of Frances Hodgkins’s sketches, which are unique records of her working method and teaching technique. ‘Lesson Demonstrations’ were Hodgkins’s principal teaching method in her art classes and these works illustrate both the confident fluidity of her brushwork and her keen eye for the nuances of light and colour. Executed rapidly, pencil marks in Lesson Demonstration, Burford are still visible beneath the washes of colour. Hodgkins evidently sketched the significant landmarks in front of her with pencil and then applied swathes of loose, thin paint, which were allowed to bleed and merge in many areas. In transcribing the vista, all attention is given over to capturing the bare essential forms of the landscape and the chromatic variances of the scene so that the work consequently assumes an abstract quality.

Hodgkins first met Jane Saunders and her partner Hannah Ritchie in 1911 at Corncarneau and the following year the pair (pictured below) joined Hodgkins’s art class at St Valery-sur-Somme. Saunders and Ritchie went on to become lifelong friends and supporters of the artist. Hodgkins’s own admiration of Saunders and Ritchie is clearly apparent in the affectionate letters that she wrote to them throughout her life, such as the letter from the 10th of January 1923 that reads:

You are two bricks to slave so hard on my behalf – I am grateful.... to a large extent I have lost my terror – thanks to you - & time I hope will prove that it pays to put me on my legs again & make me a busy useful woman again whose best work is ahead of her. You two girls have had the courage & imagination to do what other richer friends could have done twice over without turning a hair.

Hodgkins was continually supported by friends, such as Saunders and Ritchie, and she regularly received money, food parcels and commentaries on contemporary news and events from them. As a result of their continued friendship with Hodgkins, Saunders and Ritchie acquired a significant collection of her paintings, including some of her best-known works. In later years Saunders and Ritchie made generous donations of Hodgkins’s work to a number of art institutions including the Tate Gallery in London. In testament to her respect and esteem for the pair, Hodgkins painted a portrait of them which is currently held in the Pictorial Collection of the Hocken Library, Dunedin.

To Hannah Ritchie, 14th March 1925; from F.H., 61 Earls Court Square SW5

What are you doing at Easter, I could come away with you if you are not on a walking - climbing holiday - or don’t want to be alone and together. As I am not off to Australia before the autumn we have the summer before us. Do let us have a painting jaunt together …

During the early 1920s Frances Hodgkins was nothing if not peripatetic. In 1920 she spent some six months at St Ives and in December she went to France. She was back in England by the following November, and in early 1922 established a studio in Burford, in the Cotswold hills in West Oxfordshire, where she was based for most of the year and gave summer classes. She spent Easter 1923 at Rainow, Cheshire, and in October she returned to France, where she remained until February 1925.

As recounted by Myfanwy Evans in her 1948 publication for the Penguin Modern Painters series - by 1925 Hodgkins had almost made up her mind to return to New Zealand ‘for good’. Discouraged by the onset of another northern winter and disheartened by what Eric McCormick described as ‘the bleak future that seemed to lie ahead’, she had in fact booked a passage to Melbourne, Australia, and was due to sail on 30 June 1925. However, good fortune intervened when a month earlier in Manchester, which had recently become a lively centre for the arts, two of Hodgkins’s pupils and friends, Hannah Ritchie and Jane Saunders, arranged for her to meet the director of the board of the Calico Printers’ Association (CPA). This led to her having an interview and the offer of a job as a textile designer in Manchester, which she accepted. It proved challenging work and kept her away from her painting, and she found the local climate ‘awful’, but it did provide a much needed income. As she wrote to her mother: ‘I can hardly believe it that the terror of these past distracted years has passed & that life has eased for me just when I had given up all hope’.

By the beginning of 1926 Hodgkins was living in Manchester with Hannah Ritchie and Jane Saunders, who assisted her financially and remained in contact until the end of her life. They had also been the subject of her c.1922 oil on canvas, Double Portrait (Hocken Library, Dunedin). The job with the CPA was Hodgkins’s sole venture into the world of commercial art, but it was not a success. After a six months probationary period her contract was not renewed, but it appears she continued working for the company on a freelance basis. In the summer of 1926 she took sketching classes at Ludlow and Bridgnorth in Shropshire, and in November she had a successful one-person exhibition of eighty works at a gallery in Mount Street, Manchester. It seems likely that while based in Manchester she and her friends Hannah and Jane visited Rosthwaite, in Borrowdale in the English Lake District, on one of their many outings. It was this small town which provided the subject-matter for The Water Wheel.

The Water Wheel is executed largely in outline, with small amounts of shading and minimal in-filling of colour. The waterwheel itself occupies the centre of the composition and is seen slightly obliquely and flanked by the trunks of rather spindly trees, which are largely spared of branches and foliage. Several large hills, slightly shaded for definition, can be seen in the background, and a small stream in the foreground provides reflections of the overhanging trees.

In technique and probably also location, The Water Wheel relates to another watercolour, Bridge Near Rosthwaite, Borowdale 1926 (Auckland Art Gallery). In this painting a small stone bridge crossing a stream in the lower centre of the composition is surrounded by trees, again depicted as simple trunks and with some bearing large and simplified clumps of foliage. There are also steep hills outlined in the distance, and overall a restrained use of colour, mostly shades of ochre relieved by occasional patches of green.

Hodgkins remained in Manchester until around June 1927. By then her reputation appeared to be on the rise and so she decided to leave that city, it having now served its purpose, and where it just rained ‘soot & depression’. She sent a consignment of pictures back to New Zealand – five of which were shown with the Academy of Fine Arts in Wellington in September 1927 - and then quickly left for the warmer climate of Tréboul in Brittany.

Written by Jonathan Godoerham & Richard Wolfe.

From Frances Hodgkins to Isabel Field, 3rd December 1926, Manchester

“I have been very busy. I opened a Show of my Paintings on the 4th Nov and yesterday it closed. It has been a success – in spite of the badness of the times & the foulness of the weather … I have had a good & friendly reception – sold over £100 worth – which is considered good for Manchester where there is no great picture buying public as in London … With the proceeds – and greatly helped by the big advertisement & publicity – I am starting a Studio in Town and begin my Painting Classes (night & day ones) at the New Year. “

Surmounting the High Town of Bridgnorth stands the ruins of Bridgnorth Castle, begun in the 12th century by Robert de Belleme, Earl of Shrewsbury. Today, it leans at a perilous angle, a beloved folly standing in the midst of Victorian gardens. One of the reasons Frances Hodgkins delighted in Bridgnorth (she taught there over several summers between 1926 and 1932) was the variety of views and combinations of architectural and natural forms that were readily available. This work stems from her first visit in 1926, a momentous year marked by the loss of her mother in April, a rite of passage that filled her with grief, but also set her free from the ongoing guilt of not following society’s expectations of the unmarried and dutiful daughter. Now she was free to follow her own course, and creatively she returned to the memories of France that influenced her most adventurous and confident compositions. Having spent a brief time in Ludlow, she moved to Bridgnorth, a relatively short journey, but one that proved a turning point in her painting.

When Royal Academy President E J Poynter painted a similar view in 1885, he had emphasized architectural detail – every brick on each building carefully delineated, a half-timbered cottage standing out in the foreground, smoke curling up from numerous chimneys; boys on the river plying their skiffs, and the steep path leading up to the upper town, the tower of the ruined castle standing out on the skyline.

While Hodgkins has painted her watercolour from a similar vantage point, hers is a modernist approach, simplifying the forms, their blank facades stacked side by side like elongated building blocks that might equally represent buildings depicted during her time in St Paul du Var in the south of France or Montreuil-sur-Mer in 1924. The tower looms in a comparable manner, but it is perhaps her treatment of the reflections on the water that is a real point of difference. Poynter’s foreground appears almost cluttered with reflections, whereas Hodgkins creates a mood mysterious.

In November 1926 she had an extremely successful one-person exhibition at 2 Mount Street, Manchester, among which were three works entitled Bridgnorth. The second example included here seems to have zoomed in, removing the river and the castle, instead focusing on the layers of buildings, and the horizontal effects of different sets of steps. The third composition remains unidentified at this point. Manchester critic O Raymond Drey wrote in the introduction to the show’s catalogue that “she makes each stroke of her brush instinct with life.”

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Written by Mary Kisler

From Frances Hodgkins to Dorothy Selby, 21st January 1928, Hotel Moderne, Martigues, Bouches du Rhone, France

“Martigues is half Spanish – I have a small room in the Spanish quarter where I have models …there is no chasing and begging on bended knee as at Tréboul – they are only too pleased to sit and gaze at you with immense eyes for as long as you like.”

At the beginning of 1927, Frances Hodgkins set up her new studio at Grosvenor Street in Manchester in preparation for teaching. With several friends, she hired a model, who had to pose semi-clad, as if basking at the seaside instead of the freezing cold of a Mancunian winter. This marked a new approach to the human figure, not as a feature in a landscape or in a portrait, but as a form to be studied for mass, line, and structure.

In June, with the promise of a week’s teaching with Dorothy Selby, who paid generously, she travelled to Tréboul, Brittany, staying in a chalet with her friends Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines. The presence of fellow artists with whom she could discuss recent developments in art, new directions each was taking, and critiquing each other’s work were invaluable. In Manchester she had painted a series of local mill girls, appearing timeless in their shawls like modern Madonnas, their forms delineated in thick, fluid brushstrokes that appear to caress the surface on which they are painted. None of these prepares the viewer for the radical experimentation that emerged in Hodgkins’ work once back in Tréboul. Painting with gouache with a thinly loaded brush, she developed new stippling effects, pressing the end of the brush hard onto the surface so that one can differentiate the tiny lines caused by each bristle. The rich blues and greens so loved by the Impressionists, the first group to influence her development in the early days, are almost obliterated, overlain by dark ochres, navy and black, and she introduces rapid parallel marks delineating parts of the body, as if appliquéing arms and legs onto the surface. Seated Woman and Portrait of a Woman (see FH0806, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki and FH0794, University of Otago) are but two examples of this technique. Boldly drawn lines are visible beneath the paint, seemingly unrelated to the painted form.

Gradually, as if her creative spirit has been irresistibly infused with Mediterranean warmth, colour starts to dominate, overlain initially by darker strokes, which are gradually moved to the margins of her compositions. In Girl Seated on a Chair, the model in question sits backwards on a traditional rush-woven seat – the kind loved by Braque, Picasso, and Van Gogh – her hands gripping the lower rung. She wears a short, ruffled dress over a plain blue blouse, an exuberant ochre line wriggling round the neck, down the side seam and around the hem. The pattern on her dress in indecipherable, as if a shoal of fish is swimming over the surface – a deliberate choice by an artist who had produced highly controlled designs for the Calico Printing Company in Manchester the year before.

The model’s unruly red hair is kept under control in a fashionable bob, and long socks reach over her knees. Rapid diagonal brushstrokes fill in the upper left corner, unrelated to figuration, yet heightening the mood of the work. Most remarkable is the girl’s expression. She stares suspiciously at the artist from under her dense fringe, her mouth a tight line, suggesting that though young, she already knows her own mind. It is a revolutionary work within Hodgkins’ oeuvre. Eric Newton later described Hodgkins experiments with gouache as “just rich enough to give her a full chromatic range and just flexible enough not to interfere with her fine, wild handwriting.”

But what led to this rich experimentation? The year before Hodgkins had lost her mother in April, her death finally assuaging the guilt of a daughter who had chosen career over duty. Two months later, Norman Garstin also died. When Hodgkins first moved to Europe in 1901, he recognised a fellow artist rather than an initiate, encouraging Hodgkins on her determined path. Possibly these two events, once she had come to terms with their loss, set Hodgkins free psychologically. This period in Tréboul culminated in watercolours of Breton fisher boys in which black is almost eradicated, and Hodgkins is immersed again in luminous blues and greens (see FH0791 Three French Sailors, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa and FH0792 Boys Heads, Tréboul 1927, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki).

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Written by Mary Kisler

To Lucy Wertheim from F.H., 4 May 1929, Romary Cottage, Birch Grove, nr. Hayward Heath, Sussex, Saturday

I found so much to interest me & attend to when I got here on Wed: that I have not had a moments pause to sit down & write . . . I ‘should’ do some good work here – the bush fires blackened the country side but it is all now gently screened by the palest green - & the blossoms so lovely – a sweet moment & I feel great & big with inspiration & will paint …

Frances Hodgkins was included in a number of exhibitions in England and New Zealand in the period leading up to and including 1928. According to Mary Kisler this period was a turning point in her career. ‘Although works created in the 1920s demonstrate her ongoing experimentation in the handling of paint and subject matter, she was about to move in a new direction, one that would catch the attention of fellow artists and collectors alike’. Hodgkins solo exhibition, Paintings and Water-colours, at Claridge Gallery opened on the 23rd of April 1928 and featured forty-eight of her drawings, watercolours and oils. A month after her show at Claridge’s, four of her works were also included in the Modern English Water-colour Society’s Sixth Annual Exhibition at St George’s Gallery in London. That same year Hodgkins was elected a member of the progressive Seven & Five Society, exhibiting with the group for the first time in May.

Hodgkins returned to Martigues in December 1924, and then again for several months in early 1928. In March 1930 Frances Hodgkins made the significant step of signing her first dealer contract, in this case a ‘sole agency’ contract with Arthur Howell of St George’s Gallery in Hanover Square. This agreement in reality became rather short lived as the depression took hold in England. It stipulated the purchase of 33 watercolours per annum at £3 each, whereupon Hodgkins promised Howell he would receive the best she was capable of.

Buoyed by the success of her solo show and the inclusion of her works in major contemporary exhibitions Hodgkins spent the summer at Romary Cottage near Hayward Heath. She produced several large-scale drawings of the nearby villages and the Peaslake area, ‘taking up her favourite high vantage point so that the houses and fields stretched up and away from her, sometimes filling three’ quarters of the paper’. Hodgkins was enchanted by the local countryside, writing to Lucy Wertheim, ‘I am so happy here – painting in the garden – groups of wild flowers – fruit blossom & funny cottage chimney ornaments – I feel peacefully dead – to the world …’. She made regular trips into the nearby town of Haywards Heath, taking three watercolours to be framed and sent for exhibition to London.

The present drawing, The Croquet Game, Peaslake c. 1929 bears remarkable similarities to Stormy Sunset over Peaslake, Surrey (Hocken Collections, Dunedin). Both drawings stand alone as fine examples of the highly finished exhibition drawings Hodgkins produced during this period. The Croquet Game, Peaslake demonstrates Hodgkins’s exquisite calligraphic draughtsmanship as demonstrated by the more abstract rendition of the buildings on either side of the composition. This work, drawn from the hill above the village leads the eye down into the finer detail of the house and figures in the centre where even the croquet hoops can be clearly distinguished. The drawing is charecterised by an unpretentious directness and displays Hodgkins skill and bold technique, defined by her vigorous interplay between light and dark.

Eric Newton, in his foreword to Hodgkins’s 1946 Retrospective Exhibition at Lefevre Gallery, described her drawings “as being as delicate as cigarette smoke laid gently on paper: others, fierce with velvety blacks imply colour”.

Written by Jonathan Gooderham & Grace Alty