Frances Hodgkins large oil, Middle Hill c 1936, was painted after a holiday the artist had taken in October 1936 with her friend Dorothy Selby at Solva, a little fishing village in Pembrokeshire, West Wales. The location was almost certainly suggested by fellow artist and friend Cedric Morris, himself of Welsh origin, who was eager to promote the wildness of the landscape and the hospitality of the local people.

The holiday in Pembrokeshire proved a delight, for Hodgkins liked nothing better than staying among simple folk whose daily lives were tied to the rhythms of land and sea. They stayed at the Cambrian Inn ‘of blessed memory’, situated near the entrance to the village between the main road and the narrow lane leading up to Middle Mill a mile away. Graham Sutherland, an up-and-coming young artist, had recently stayed at the same inn, although the two women felt the painting he had left behind was too much like a Cedric Morris to be successful.

Solva, with its access to the sea, cliff walks and the hills beyond, was a favourite with holiday makers, whereas the little settlement of Middle Mill was quieter and sheltered, an ideal place in which to spend the day without interruption. The village comprised of a few cottages, getting its name from the corn and woollen mills nestled on the river Solva on the far side of the bridge. Mills had always attracted Hodgkins, not least because their large wooden wheels created a pleasing circular form in a composition, while the ripples and sparkles of flowing water in sunlight could bring a scene to life. Middle Mill proved no exception, but it was the field downstream from the bridge, where two cows grazed during the day, that provided the views that appealed to her most. These cows were walked up the lane from Solva by Linda the Milk, daughter of Willie Thomas Panteg, a local identity. She left them in the field for the day, then herded them back to Solva for their evening milking, before delivering fresh milk to her happy customers.

Hodgkins’ watercolour sketches of the time suggest she was working very rapidly. Seemingly random brushstrokes were often enough to imply details, awaiting a more creative intervention that could be developed once she was back in her studio, a necessity when working with slow drying oil paint. While her initial sketches observe the construction of the bridge in more detail, in her final paintings Hodgkins has turned the relatively flat bridge into a curved mound, mirroring the arches resting below on large stones in the riverbed, but with two curves rather than three. The mound is a form to be looked at, rather than considered as a means of crossing from one side of the river to the other, reminding us that compositions are the creative invention of the artist rather than a faithful reproduction of reality.

Hodgkins’ dealer in the early 1930s, Arthur Howell, noted in his book about their relationship, Four Vital Years (1951), that while an artist might initially feel delight at mastering form (p. 16), great art had to be more than just mimesis. He felt that her painting practice drew on her facility of recall, allowing a focus on preferred motifs and forms and leaving aside the extraneous clutter that inevitably fills every aspect of any landscape. This acuity continued to play into her compositions long after she left a location. The stump in the foreground of Middle Hill resembles those that dotted the background of her French Riviera paintings of 1931, while she has exaggerated the water tumbling over the weir (in reality, two stones forcing the water to froth briefly as it flows downstream towards the sea). Hodgkins often stayed at Geoffrey Gorer’s cottage at Bradford-on-Tone in Somerset, painting numerous versions of the substantial weir found nearby. All these natural elements became ‘motifs of the mind’ that she drew on at will to enhance her compositions. So too, the white houses that dot the slope to the left of Middle Hill owe more to the simple cubic forms of houses she had painted on Ibiza in 1932-33 than the low cottages found in much of Pembrokeshire. A single stroke of paint upper left stands in for the windows, with a similar larger stroke implying a door on the lower right. Plucked from their natural resting places, Hodgkins scatters these motifs on the hillside as she pleases.

It was Arthur Howell who first wrote about the links between Hodgkins’ painting and her love of music, particularly Bach. From their discussions early in the 1930s, he felt that ‘she believed in and were trying to stumble upon a feature or parallel common to the constructive processes’ found in each artform (p.66). The analogy with Bach returned to Howell when he watched her painting in her London studio. Each carefully considered brush stroke of colour was built up like a musical annotation on a score (p. 91). Howell compared this process of ‘orchestration’, where Hodgkins ‘saw’ the stages of her painting inwardly before applying paint to canvas, to the way a musician must ‘hear’ sounds before writing them down. There is a very strong sense of this process in Middle Hill – layers of tone in each section of the composition meld gently as you step back from the canvas, only to reveal their layered individuality when you advance once more. Clumps built up with parallel strokes represent reeds on the riverbank, while drifts of grasses spread out across the foreground. One might almost imagine them whispering softly in the breeze, accompanied by the trills of water flowing by. Even the cows appear to be engaging in a bovine dance. Responding to Hodgkins’ inner vision, the harmonies of colour, line and form become a symphonic arrangement, no single element discordant or out of place, an image that plays on in the mind long after the actual painting moves from sight.

The title Middle Hill (as the work was called from the moment it was first exhibited at Lefevre Galleries, London, in 1937) may be an example of the artist’s wit, a dealer’s mistake, or simply a way to differentiate the painting from other studies that used the title Middle Mill as a locator. The painting gave the artist great satisfaction and was still in her possession in 1939, when she was selected to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale in October 1940. The other artists chosen were Duncan Grant, Frank Dobson, Glyn Philpot, Alfred Munnings and Edward Wadsworth. Shortly after the Nazi invasion of Poland on 1st September 1939, the British Council started to have concerns about the show, wondering if the risk of sending artwork to Italy was too great a risk under the circumstances.

As late as March 1940, however, Hodgkins hoped the Biennale would still take place, writing to Elizabeth Rhind; ‘I am represented at Venice in May by a Roomful of 25 Paintings. This is an important show & I'm proud of the honour. Duncan Grant, Wadsworth & Munnings are the other artists invited. Each a Room. The Ex: is the famous Biennale International. I hope nothing horrid will happen to mar its success. I may add the prize money is considerable…’

She had been busy writing to various collectors and dealers, asking to borrow back her favourite works for the exhibition. However, on May 4th, 1940, Hodgkins wrote to her brother William; ‘Before hanging my own Show I had the pleasure of seeing the 26 pictures for Venice collected together before being sent off in a specially constructed travelling van. They looked good. Alas they got no further than Paris…’

Finally, the decision was made to hold the exhibition at Hertford House (home of the Wallace Collection), where it was displayed from 17th May to 8th June 1940. The foreword to the catalogue produced by the British Council for the London show explained that the works had been due to set out across Europe to the British Pavilion in Venice at the end of April, but that being impossible, the decision had been made to hold the show of British works in London. It also noted; ‘… every other year, is displayed a sample of what each country is producing and what its public admires; and thus, though it is improbable that anyone will like all that he is shown, he must be hard to please who likes nothing. Should one result of such an exhibition be a small increase in the spirit of toleration, the exhibition will not have been held in vain.’

Hodgkins was not so magnanimous. While she had been delighted to see so many works from different parts of her career before they set off for Paris, before turning back, she wrote to her dealer at the Leicester Galleries, ‘As for Venice. I feel surely tempted to curse Mussolini. Still, it is not quite as embittering as it might have been had the pictures been destroyed or damaged - or lost. It is some consolation to have them shown in London & to the benefit of the Artists’ Benevolent Fund.’ She didn’t visit the exhibition in London, travel having become difficult because of the war. It is sad to think she didn’t have the pleasure of seeing her cows dancing to their own tune on the walls of Hereford House.

Written by Mary Kisler