Frances Hodgkins – Seaside Lodgings
A highlight from our recent Works of Art auction is Seaside Lodgings by the pioneering Frances Hodgkins. Enjoy the essay and video below from Linda Tyler, Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Auckland, who joined us at Webb’s to teach us more about this remarkable painting.
Born in Dunedin in 1869, Hodgkins travelled to London in 1901 and became one of the leaders of the English avant-garde movement. Her extensive travels helped evolve her style from impressionistic watercolours to striking twentieth-century modernist paintings—Seaside Lodgings being a fine example of the latter.
Frances Hodgkins
Seaside Lodgings
c1919
oil on canvas
signed FRANCES HODGKINS in brushpoint lower left
650 x 630mm
Estimate: $240,000 - $360,000
FRANCES HODGKINS
Seaside Lodgings
Essay by LINDA TYLER
Painted when expatriate artist Frances Hodgkins was based in St Ives, Cornwall, this depiction of two women crammed behind a breakfast table in a parlour is reminiscent of the subject matter of the British post-impressionist Camden Town Group. Founded by Walter Sickert in London in 1911, the group’s approach to portraying lower-middle-class life with gritty realism is exemplified by Sickert’s own portrayal of a bored couple in a dated interior.
Eric McCormick, Hodgkins’ biographer, bases his dating of the painting on a letter home to her mother, in which she exults, “The Director of the Carnegie Institute.
I told you of has seen my ‘Seaside Lodgings’ at the International & written specially inviting it to America.”1 ‘The International’ was the abbreviation for the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers, which operated in London from 1898 to 1925. Hodgkins had been showing with this group since 1911, and six of her works were included in the autumn exhibition in October 1919, the society’s 26th, which was held at the Grosvenor Gallery at 51a New Bond Street. Listed in the catalogue as number 377, Seaside Lodgings was her only oil, and caught the attention of John Wesley Beatty (1850–1924), the inaugural director of the Department of Fine Arts at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. He was on a mission to collect “the old masters of tomorrow” for his institution’s annual survey of contemporary painting.
Frances Hodgkins in her studio, St Ives, Cornwall, 1918. Photograph by Beatrice Wood.
The Daily Express’s account of Seaside Lodgings in this exhibition called it “The Fatal Picture”, attributing it to a Mr Francis Hodgkins. The Belfast Telegraph compounded the error by misspelling Hodgkins’ surname.
Their review of the painting is titled “Seaside Lodging Realism”, and derides the dreariness of English bed and breakfast boarding houses by the sea:
There is one picture in the exhibition of the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Engravers at the Grosvenor Gallery which must not – which cannot – be missed. Its number in the catalogue is 377. It is called “Seaside Lodgings.” It is painted by Mr. Francis Hodgins. The realism of the picture is terrible. There are 599 exhibits, but after brief glances at them one returns to “seaside lodgings.”
The picture (the London “Daily Express” says) is that of a parlour in a house which is almost certainly called “Seaview.” The room contains two desolate female figures. One of them is seated at the breakfast table trying hard to be cheerful. The other is gazing at the mantelpiece, on which there are some ornamental vases of the period of Albert the Good. It is a room of d’oyleys, antimacassars, and wax fruit under glass. These things are suggested rather than actually represented. One feels that they are there just as one realises that on a back bookshelf there is a mildewed volume of the “Quiver” and a copy of “Christie’s Old Organ.”2
Old-fashioned features depicted by Hodgkins in her interior include the kerosene lamp and the mantelpiece decorations, suggesting arts of British manufacture such as those championed by Queen Victoria’s consort Prince Albert (1819–1861) 70 years previously. Yet there are symbols of youth and vitality included here too: bunches of daisies in the blue vases at either end of the piano where one woman sits doing her needlework, and another arrangement of flowers in a pink vase on top of a sideboard, above the head of the second woman, whose face is lit in profile as she reads a newspaper. These fresh blooms and the fireplace with its potted plant in the grate suggest that it is summertime, and these youthful women are enjoying a holiday together by the seaside. Far from searching for copies of the Victorian children’s book by Amy Walton or the biblical weekly magazine imagined by the reviewer, they appear to be quietly communing in the bright morning light as they wait for breakfast to be served. An array of coffee pots, jugs and crockery is tipped up towards the viewer to allow us to survey the pleasing arrangement of forms outlined on the white diamond shape of the tabletop.
1920 Carnegie Institute International Exhibition of Paintings catalogue, which featured Hodgkins' Seaside Lodgings.
Ennui (1917–18) by Walter Sickert, which exemplified The Camden Town Group's artistic approach.
What would the Americans have made of this time capsule of British seaside holidaying when the painting went on display in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and at the Albright Gallery in Buffalo, New York, in the summer of 1920? That was the year in which the 19th Amendment to the American Constitution gave (white) women the vote, eight years ahead of their British counterparts. The painting came back to Hodgkins for inclusion
in a major exhibition of 80 paintings she staged in the basement at 2 Mount Street, Manchester, in November 1926. Priced by the artist at £40 in recognition of its recent American exposure, it was the second most expensive work in that show. The following year, she packaged it up as part of a large collection of her unsold work and sent it to her brother, William John Parker Hodgkins (1866–1945), who was then working as a bank manager in Invercargill. Obligingly, he submitted her paintings to exhibitions in several cities. In Christchurch in March 1928, Seaside Lodgings featured at the Canterbury Society of Arts. The discerning academic and critic James Shelley (1884–1961) rejoiced in the way Hodgkins had embraced “the more revolutionary [art] movements of Europe”3, and commended this painting as a “flat-toned experiment in distorted drawing” in his Lyttelton Times review.4
Among the last of the artist’s work exhibited, but too modern to be sold in New Zealand during her lifetime, Seaside Lodgings remained in her brother’s possession until his death in 1945, when it was inherited by his son, Geoffrey William Michael Hodgkins (1902–1965), the Tauranga naturalist. Michael Hodgkins sold the painting to economist William Ball Sutch (1907–1975) when he returned from the United Nations in New York in 1951. The work remained in Sutch’s stewardship thereafter, and in 1954 it was included in Eric McCormick’s catalogue Works of Frances Hodgkins in New Zealand, published by Auckland Art Gallery. Listed then as catalogue number 268, the work was described as emphasising “the solid appearance of objects … so reminiscent of Camden Town theorisings.”5
1 Letter from Frances Hodgkins to Rachel Hodgkins, 18 November 1919, in Letters from Frances Hodgkins. Field, Isabel Jane, 1867–1950 : Correspondence of Frances Hodgkins and family / collected by Isabel Field. Ref: MS-Papers-0085. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington.
2 “Seaside Lodging Realism,” Belfast Telegraph, 8 October 1919, 4.
3 James Shelley, “Canterbury Society of Arts Exhibition,” Lyttelton Times, 19 March 1928, 5.
4 James Shelley, “Canterbury Society of Arts Exhibition,” Lyttelton Times, 13 April 1928, 10.
5 Eric McCormick, Works of Frances Hodgkins in New Zealand (Auckland City Art Gallery, 1954), 99.
Provenance
The Sutch-Ovenden Collection, Wellington. Acquired privately; Collection of Michael Hodgkins, Tauranga. Passed by bequest; Collection of William Hodgkins, Invercargill.
Exhibitions
Frances Hodgkins: From Dunedin to Waikanae, Toi Mahara Gallery, Waikanae, April–May 2019; Canterbury Society of Arts: 48th Annual Exhibition, Canterbury Society of Arts Gallery, Christchurch, March 1928; Exhibition of Paintings by Frances Hodgkins, Mount Street Gallery, Manchester, 4–30 November 1926; Foreign Paintings from the Carnegie Institute International Exhibition, Albright Art Gallery, Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, New York, 10–31 October 1920; Nineteenth Annual International Exhibitions of Paintings, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, 29 April–13 June 1920; International Society, 26th Exhibition, Grosvenor Gallery, London, October 1919.
Literature
E H McCormick, Works of Frances Hodgkins in New Zealand (Auckland: Auckland City Art Gallery, 1954), 196; E H McCormick, Portrait of Frances Hodgkins (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1981), 94.
Note
The Complete Frances Hodgkins catalogue raisonné number: FH0630.
View all articles & videos here