Frances Hodgkins

Biography

Hodgkins painted her first canvas in oil only in 1915, when she was forty-six. Until then she had been a watercolourist, and a fairly successful one.

She was born on 28 April 1869 in Dunedin, New Zealand, the third of seven children. Her father, William Mathew Hodgkins, was a lawyer, an amateur painter and a well-known figure in local art circles: in 1875 he took part in founding the city’s art society. She and her sister Isabel attended private schools. Frances’s first works were charcoal drawings, and in 1890 she first exhibited landscapes and portraits in Christchurch and Dunedin. From 1893 she took lessons from the Italian painter Girolamo Pieri Nerli; from him came her portraits of Māori women and “Head of an Old Woman”, for which she received the New Zealand Academy of Arts prize in 1895. In 1895–1896 she studied at the Dunedin School of Art, then gave private lessons and drew for newspapers and magazines, saving money for a journey to England. Her father had gone bankrupt by then (1888), and money was a difficulty for her all her life.

In 1901 she set out for Europe. She studied in London and, with her friend the painter Dorothy Kate Richmond, painted in France, the Netherlands, Italy and Morocco. In 1903 her watercolour “Fatima” was accepted by the Royal Academy of Arts in London. At the end of 1903 she went home and opened a studio in Wellington, and in 1906 she left for Europe again, this time for good.

Her first solo exhibition took place in London, at Paterson’s Gallery, in 1907. In 1908 she settled in Paris, exhibited at the salons and taught at the Académie Colarossi, where she became the first woman instructor. She then opened her own school of watercolour; by some accounts in Concarneau, by others in Paris. With her pupils, mostly British, she went to paint from nature in Normandy, Picardy and Brittany. In 1912–1913 she visited New Zealand once more and showed watercolours in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Dunedin. Then she returned to Europe permanently.

The years of the First World War were spent in Cornwall, at St Ives and Zennor. There she moved to large formats, to oil and tempera, and she herself called this period “experimental”. In a letter to her mother she admitted that she had become “too modern” and that it was hard to go back to her earlier manner, which had sold well.

The 1920s were hard. Exhibitions in 1920 and 1923 in small London galleries brought neither recognition nor money; she travelled a great deal in France, living now with friends, now in cheap rooms, often with help from her family. In 1925 she took a job as a fabric designer at the Calico Printers’ Association in Manchester. A solo exhibition there in 1926 proved unexpectedly successful, and she gave up the teaching that had supported her for many years in order to paint full time. In 1928 her London exhibition at the Claridge Gallery made a strong impression; critics see the influence of Matisse and Derain on her manner in those years.

In 1929 Hodgkins joined the Seven and Five Society, a group of avant-garde British artists whose exhibitors included the younger Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and Henry Moore. In the 1930s many London galleries showed her work, and the Lefevre Gallery signed a contract with her for a solo exhibition every second year. She often spent winters in Spain and Ibiza and travelled to France and Wales. Her forms became simpler and colour more important, and still life increasingly merged with landscape. I think this is clearest in the late pictures, where the objects on the table are almost a landscape.

In 1939 she was invited to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale of the following year, but because of the war the works were not sent. She spent the war in England, including Bradford-on-Tone in Somerset, and kept working. In 1942 she was granted a state pension, in 1944 the Tate Gallery bought one of her works, and in 1946 a retrospective at the Lefevre Gallery covered forty-four years, from 1902 to 1946, and received very good reviews.

In late March 1947 Hodgkins was admitted to a clinic near Dorchester, and she died there on 13 May. Her ashes were returned to New Zealand and lie in the family grave in Wellington. In 1962 the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship was established in her name at the University of Otago in Dunedin.