Houses and Outhouses, Purbeck, is one of Frances Hodgkins’ key late works. Exhibited to acclaim at the time, it was described by the artist as ‘unquestionably my high spot’. This painting was first shown in the 1941 Leicester Galleries exhibition, which included other major late oils and the recently discovered gouache Methodist Chapel. The exhibition was reviewed by John Piper, who extolled the artist’s ‘songlike expression’ and focused on her achievement as a colourist, borrowing terms, as others have, from music: ‘…it means talking of scintillations and explosions, chromatic runs and exciting leaps…’. But, acutely, he also described the work as an example of her ‘war art’, not because the work was of ‘tank traps’, but because ‘she has found…subjects that are symbolic enough: 'railed-in areas, concentration camps, of rusty milk cans, farm implements in disuse or dereliction, a man plucking fowl in an outhouse’. This interpretation places this and other related works by Hodgkins squarely within the context of neo-romanticism.

Piper was a central figure within neo-romanticism and his importance for and support of Hodgkins has been recognised. But his debt as an artist to her has perhaps been underestimated. From the rich painterly qualities of a work like this (once owned by Piper) it is clear that inspiration could run both ways. Houses and Outhouses, Purbeck verges on abstraction, divorced from the descriptive. In her 1946 Retrospective Exhibition this painting hung alongside Dairy Farm - a work depicting bright orange milk-churns. Both large oils see the artist, in her seventies, producing a significant contribution to British neo-romanticism through a sensuous and idiosyncratic painterliness.

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Iain Buchanan, Elizabeth Eastman and Michael Dunn, Frances Hodgkins, Paintings and Drawings. pp. 168-9