Top

-

 
 

Frances Hodgkins

Lancashire Children c.1927

Oil on canvas, 74 x 61 cm
Signed lower left & lower right


Lancashire Children was probably painted by Hodgkins in Manchester around the same time as Lancashire Family, but in her new, richer painting style. Although she keeps the dominant ochre colouration of Lancashire Family, the paint is much more thickly applied: layered and impasted so that the gestural brush marks carry an expressive force. This style becomes increasingly apparent in her works of the late 1920s, such as A Country Window and Still Life in a Landscape. The children are framed by a window with still-life objects in the foreground, a format that anticipates her still-life paintings of the 1930s. This was a theme already in use among members of the Seven and Five Society, which she was to join in 1929. The intense blue sky with its striated pattern of clouds also becomes a feature of her later Mediterranean landscapes. Originally the sky extended to the top of the canvas, where the blue paint can still be seen under the brown layer, indicating that the framing device only entered at a late stage of the painting's execution.

_

I. Buchanan, M. Dunn, E. Eastmond. Frances Hodgkins: Paintings and Drawings (Auckland University Press, 2001) Plate 19, p. 124


Exhibited

London, U.K. Whitford and Hughes, Frances Hodgkins 1869 - 1947. 1990

Auckland, N.Z. Jonathan Grant Gallery, Frances Hodgkins November 1993
 

Literature

I. Buchanan, M. Dunn, E. Eastmond, Frances Hodgkins: Paintings and Drawings (Auckland University Press, 2001), p. 124

Reference

Frances Hodgkins Database FH0807
(completefranceshodgkins.com)

Illustrated

I. Buchanan, M. Dunn, E. Eastmond, Frances Hodgkins: Paintings and Drawings (Auckland University Press, 2001) Plate 19, p. 124

Avenal McKinnon, Frances Hodgkins 1869 - 1947. Whitford and Hughes (London, 1990) No. 8.