Letters of Frances Hodgkins

These outside influences coincided with the marriage of Isabel Hodgkins in and her departure from Dunedin to live in Wellington with her lawyer husband, W. As Isabel Field she continued to paint, but her responsibilities as wife and mother left no time for serious study and her work did not develop. The example of her sister, like that of her father, is of abiding importance in the career of Frances Hodgkins. The Hodgkins family fortunes had declined in the s, and during the s Frances prepared to earn her own living. In —96 she attended the Dunedin School of Art and Design, partly to impose upon herself the discipline of regular study but mainly to qualify as a teacher.

She gained first-class passes in both the elementary and advanced stages of the British-based South Kensington examinations, and in started private art classes. A witty, energetic, outspoken woman, Hodgkins was an excellent teacher. Her father's death early in and a further reduction in the family circumstances strengthened her ambition. Throughout and , with the encouragement of her mother with whom she was living, she worked to raise money to go to England to study.

As well as preparing for exhibitions and teaching, she did black-and-white illustrations for newspapers and magazines. When she left New Zealand in February she was following the example of many of her contemporaries, notably Dorothy Richmond, A. On her arrival in England Frances Hodgkins enrolled at the London polytechnic where her drawing teacher was Borough Johnson. This perhaps typically colonial mixture of humility and confidence enabled her throughout her life to adapt new ideas to her own purposes; it was an attitude already exemplified in her response to Nerli.

He immediately acknowledged her as a fellow artist by refusing to accept fees, and welcomed her as a friend on later sketching excursions in France, Belgium and the Netherlands in and Frances Hodgkins formed a close friendship with Dorothy Richmond and the two women travelled and painted together through the autumn and winter in the south of France and northern Italy, exhibiting their work in October at a Bayswater gallery run by the New Zealander John Baillie.

Dorothy Richmond was the first of many beloved friends whose faith in her talent, backed up by financial and practical help, sustained Frances Hodgkins. Hodgkins spent the winter of in Morocco, and 'Fatima', a large watercolour, was hung 'on the Line' at the Royal Academy of Arts in — the first time a New Zealander had achieved this distinction. Although Hodgkins was aware of the conservatism of the Royal Academy, its prestige remained and she was delighted at her success. Throughout her three-year absence Hodgkins had regularly sent work for exhibition in New Zealand and sales had supplemented her savings.

She had sought out in Europe the acceptably picturesque themes: By the end of her stay the illustrative element was taking second place to concentration on colour and light. She brought work back to exhibit and left some behind with an agent in London. In her absence her work was again accepted by the Royal Academy in and In Hodgkins established a teaching studio in Bowen Street, Wellington, where she had gone to live with her mother, and tried to settle down to the career her European studies had been intended for.

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Sometime that year she agreed to marry T. Wilby, an English writer whom she had met on the journey out from England. Early in the engagement was broken off and in June Frances Hodgkins was painting with Dorothy Richmond in Rotorua, returning to her earlier interest in the Maori. A few sentences in letters to her mother indicate that she had suffered during her relationship with Wilby, but nothing more is known about it.

Hodgkins had many male friends thereafter but this was the only time she seriously considered marriage. She returned to England by herself in February and by April was in Venice. For the next seven years Hodgkins lived and worked in Europe, with short stays in Britain in and In she held her first solo exhibition in London at Paterson's Gallery. She resumed her friendship with Norman Garstin and his circle, which included the artist Moffat Lindner and several single women with a serious interest in painting who took the place of Dorothy Richmond in her life.

In she held a summer sketching class in Dordrecht and spent over a year at various sketching grounds in the Netherlands. In she shared with the Australian artist Thea Proctor first prize in the Australian section of women's art at the Franco-British Exhibition. A crucial decision took her to Paris at the end of , and the city became her base for the next four years.

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Although she disliked the turmoil of big cities she was challenged by the intellectual life of Paris. She visited the galleries where contemporary painters such as Picasso exhibited, and kept an open mind about the more advanced ideas encountered. Impressionism and post-impressionism were the immediate influences on her own work. The following year she started her own successful School for Water Colour in Paris. From November to October Frances Hodgkins was once again in the antipodes, this time as a visitor: In Australia her work seemed the ultimate in modernity and created a sensation.

It was praised by the critics and bought by private and public collectors.

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The response from New Zealanders was less enthusiastic, but both Wellington and Dunedin acquired watercolours for the permanent city collections. Frances Hodgkins Flatford Mill Frances Hodgkins The Lake c. Frances Hodgkins Portrait of Kitty West Frances Hodgkins Broken Tractor Frances Hodgkins Seated Woman c. Sir Cedric Morris, Bt, recipient: Dame Barbara Hepworth Volume of sculpture records Julian Trevelyan Scrapbook 14 December —[c.

Spring Tate Papers no. Some prefer it hadn't. Andy Boston was in high spirits himself back in , when a package arrived at his Waiheke Island hilltop home from England, from an eBay trader called Elaine Nisbet. The consignment contained four drawings; three watercolours; two oils; and three textile designs. Boston is a sometime event manager and caterer.

Frances Hodgkins

Nisbet had wandered into unfamiliar territory: On the other hand, Boston has put some points on the board and had a relatively good run in the media far and wide, which has rendered the circumstances surrounding the discovery of the alleged Hodgkins a deal more colourful, if not significant. Boston contends that Hodgkins made the 12 works in the s and s. Three of the drawings are self-portraits — one of herself as a year-old figure 01 , Boston says. They are unusual because Hodgkins was not known for her conventional self-portraits — unusual but not inexplicable, says Boston, because Hodgkins changed styles frequently.

Boston admits his collection is not representative of the artist at her best. Because she did do stuff that bad. She destroyed a lot of stuff herself. She was unable to hold her pencil sometimes because of her arthritis. Boston has sought the imprimatur of the International Art Centre and other auctioneers, dealers, and public institutions: Left, the zig-zag design with repeated blue smears purportedly made by Hodgkins with downward thumb movements; One of the disputed works that carries a signature. I have become one of her biggest fans, not just on an artistic level but as a human being who remained true to her calling despite massive hardships.

I look forward to continuing this challenge and once again thank you for your response. To a professor of art history, who after seeing the works in person expressed incredulity to Boston and wished him well in his art career, he replied: These items were found in a house clearance in Weymouth.

Letters of Frances Hodgkins / edited by Linda Gill - Details - Trove

That is the fact. Boston offered to make the trip over from Waiheke with his haul: It has to fit. She also never painted a traditional self-portrait, but instead created semi-abstracted groups of her favourite objects — a pink shoe, scarves, belts, jewellery, flowers — like a post-modern metaphor for the self. On the other issue of the six signatures, in which Boston places great store: In one letter, Hodgkins writes that she is unsure whether she or Ritchie had signed a work.

It was a bad Victorian watercolour of a subject and style that bore no relationship to Hodgkins, he says. Boston was the vendor. As Gow was weighing his options, Boston rang, and things took a turn to the surreal. I know a Frances Hodgkins when I see one and that is not one. It was an instruction that Boston ignored: It is signed and dated and comes from a short period of time that Hodgkins was teaching students in a small coastal village in France. I am confident it is authentic and will wait till after The Hidden Portfolio debate has run its course before bringing it back to the light of day.