Letter to Rachel Hodgkins. From Pennocks Hotel, Dordrecht. 8th September 1907

”I find my circle is spreading. The Editor of the local paper is reported to have said that there were 42 ladies making pictures of Dordrecht but only one artist. Modesty forbids me mentioning names.

In May 1907 Frances Hodgkins travelled from London to the Dutch river town of Dordrecht, initiating one of the most formative periods of her early European career. She arrived with the practical intention of supporting herself through teaching, writing before departure that she would leave “with 2 pupils,” hoping that others would follow, and charging “£6 a month.” Dordrecht offered both affordability and stability: she lodged at the quiet and “homey old” Pennocks Hotel, where she could live “for less than 30/- a week,” with access to “a good studio.” The modest rhythms of provincial Dutch life suited her, and she quickly grew attached to the town’s atmosphere, architecture, and waterways.

The harbour watercolours produced during the summer of 1907 are among the most lyrical expressions of this attachment and several are held in public gallery collections. In Dordrecht Harbour, the scene is organised in broad, simplified planes of colour. The emerald hulls of the Hoys (Heude-ships) sit low across the foreground, their curved forms mirrored in the softly rippling water below. Hodgkins has set up her easel on the northern corner of the Bomkade, looking across Bomhaven harbour towards the majestic tower of Dordrecht Minster. She allows the reflections to dissolve into fluid washes of green, violet, and smoky grey, so that the surface of the harbour becomes as important as the architecture beyond it. The boats are not described in hard detail but suggested through quick, economical strokes, giving the impression of stillness and quiet mooring rather than activity.

Vertical elements dominate the middle distance. A cluster of masts rises sharply against the pale summer sky, echoing and reinforcing the monumental presence of the tower of the 13th Century Grote Kerk of Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk to the right. The church is rendered in warm russet and ochre tones, its mass softened by the translucency of the watercolour medium. Rather than sharply defining the masonry, Hodgkins lets the structure emerge through layered washes, creating an atmosphere of haze and light.

To the left, the sail drying near the waterfront introduces a contrasting note of airy whiteness, balanced by the dark green mass of trees at Maartensgat. Throughout the composition, Hodgkins favours suggestion over precision: the townscape behind the boats is reduced to mottled touches and blurred silhouettes, while the harbour water shimmers with broken colour and reflected light. The overall effect is one of calm observation, a poetic impression of Dordrecht’s working waterfront, where boats, tower, and water are united in a harmonious vertical and horizontal rhythm.

Hodgkins’ letters from this period reveal how deeply she valued these conditions. Dordrecht, she wrote, was “such a beautiful old town,” and Holland offered “never a more beautiful country for atmosphere.” The calm harbour subject, with its emphasis on reflection and tonal harmony, demonstrates her growing ambition within watercolour, a medium she increasingly treated with the seriousness of oil.

Alongside her own painting, Hodgkins maintained a small but fluctuating circle of pupils, teaching in the mornings while reserving afternoons for work. She found artistic companionship through figures such as Evert Moll and Moffat Lindner, whose sketches she admired for showing “what to do with water colour,” and she drew inspiration from excursions to Amsterdam and Haarlem. Encountering Frans Hals paintings again at the Frans Hals Museum, she praised the portraits’ “wonderful freshness & vigour,” their “tingling vividness… that set one on fire,” recognising a painterly immediacy she sought in her own work.

Professional recognition followed. In March 1908 she was elected Associate, Society of Women Artists. Invitations to exhibit arrived from London, Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, and Brighton, and she achieved a significant breakthrough when two works were accepted into the major Amsterdam exhibition held every four years, “one of a certain international importance.” Though sales were modest she sold several small works for £5 each, including “a little Dutch head” which was encouraging, and by September, with a fresh intake of pupils, she noted that with teaching fees she was “quite in funds.”

Despite illness briefly interrupting her productivity, Dordrecht remained a place of emotional attachment. When the time came to leave in July 1908, she wrote sorrowfully of saying goodbye to “dear little Dordrecht,” confessing that she had “never been out of love with it all the time I have been here.” The harbour scenes of 1907–08 stand as enduring records of this affection: works in which atmosphere, reflection, and architectural silhouette combine to mark an important moment of consolidation in Hodgkins’ European career.

From Frances Hodgkins to Rachel Hodgkins. Wharf Studio St Ives Sept 18th 1918

My Dearest Mother … I heard from the International Society that they would give me a wall to myself for my Water Colours at the coming show next week. This caused some flutter, but luckily most of them were finished. They are small pictures mostly at easy prices – all babies & Mothers & children. Sort of Infant Welfare idea if you can stretch the point so far – as attractive as I could make them. I gave the Mothers (5) and their offspring (numerous) a tea party at the Hotel before I left. Such fun – they were so nice & blushing & shining over it all got up regardless. Dear women all of them with husbands fighting & one a prisoner who had never seen his beautiful baby. One of them brought me 2 lbs of blackberries & another broad beans, so broad they might have been marrows. I found afterwards kind Mrs Cox the landlady had given me the party for nothing, as I had given her a sketch of her child & she was grateful.

Between 1917 and 1918, in the final years of the First World War, Frances Hodgkins was living in the Cornish coastal town of St Ives. Artists who had traditionally worked en plein air were compelled to move indoors under War Department restrictions, making studio portraiture both practical and commercially viable. In 1916, while living in Chipping Campden, Hodgkins had already begun a series of small watercolour portraits of babies when bad weather kept her inside. Now in St Ives, restricted once again, this time by wartime mandate, and reliant on portrait commissions to supplement her modest teaching income, she continued her intimate studies of mothers and infants. In March 1918 she wrote wryly to her brother-in-law William:

What I want is a small & tidy income so that I need not have to fight for daily bread. Truly living is a fine art these days. Yesterday I sold a 12 guinea baby. Item: Paint more babies!

In Child Asleep (c.1917), Hodgkins’ handling of watercolour is especially expressive. Transparent washes in a cool-toned palette bleed softly into one another, creating an atmosphere of intimacy and transience. Warmth is concentrated in the child’s flushed cheeks, while the setting is suggested rather than described: the checked blanket, crisp sheets, and surrounding space emerge through rhythmic marks and passages of colour, with the whiteness of the textured paper. Form is conveyed through tone and gesture rather than firm delineation, signalling her increasingly modern sensibility.

The child’s softly modelled face anchors the composition, while the painterly abstraction of the background heightens the stillness of sleep. Hodgkins captures not only a likeness but also a mood; a fleeting moment of calm that stands in poignant contrast to the wartime uncertainty beyond the domestic interior.

Hodgkins’ repeated return to babies and young children during these years was not merely a matter of convenience, but part of a broader shift in her artistic circumstances. With war limiting travel, exhibition opportunities, and outdoor work, the domestic sphere offered both subject matter and economic survival. Infants, in particular, embodied ideals of innocence and continuity at a time when European society was marked by loss and upheaval.

At the same time, the informality of these “baby pictures” afforded Hodgkins space to experiment. Unlike more formal commissioned portraits, her studies of sleeping or resting children favour atmosphere over exact likeness. They become exercises in colour harmony, soft modelling, and the expressive possibilities of watercolour. Outwardly modest domestic images, these works occupy an important position within her development, contributing to the increasingly modern character of her art while also providing a measure of financial security.

In Child Asleep, Hodgkins transforms portraiture into something more than professional necessity. The subject may have been marketable, but the result is deeply personal: a meditation on innocence, stillness, and refuge. In wartime Britain such images carried particular resonance, offering reassurance through the familiar intimacy of home. Some of the children depicted in these St Ives portraits had never been seen by their fathers, absent on military service. The painting stands as both a tender study of childhood and a subtle reminder of art’s restorative power in troubled times.

To Myfanwy Evans, 15th May 1940; from F. H., Studio, West St, Corfe Castle, Dorset

I was made so happy by what you & John wrote about me and I owe you very particular thanks – it gave to my show all the success I could hope for it …

In May 1940 Hodgkins thanked writer and art critic Myfanwy Evans and her husband, the painter John Piper, for their encouragement and support. Two years earlier she had produced a lithograph, her only surviving print, which was commissioned by a venture founded by John Piper and Robert Wellington, and which aimed to make quality and reasonably priced original prints available to the public. The actual printing was carried out by Curwen Press, in Plaistow, East London, where the artists drew their images on the lithographic stones and were able to receive technical assistance from Piper. Hodgkins’ Arrangement of Jugs was one of fifteen prints in the second series, launched in March 1938, which also included images by Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and Piper. Although an edition of 300 was planned, only about half this number was achieved due to the outbreak of the Second World War. Further to this, few of the completed lithographs were signed by the artists.

Arrangement of Jugs represents an extension of Hodgkins’ interest in the possibilities of colour and form. In addition to a trio of jugs (blue, red and green), this composition includes the two familiar yellow ceramic vases and a modernist green glass vase, a lamp and another less easily identifiable object. As with the earlier watercolour of the same name, elements are reduced to simple forms or outlines, with areas of colour which may relate only loosely to the objects they are describing. As before, the overlapping of objects and the suggestion of their placement on a flat surface adds a sense of depth to the composition. Otherwise, the objects appear to ‘float’ free from the surface of the paper, much of which is left untouched, while in parts – such as on the foreground glass ornament – it shows the granular effect characteristic of the lithographic process. John Piper was complimentary about Hodgkins’ print, considering it ‘the best in the series.’ The artist herself was also pleased with the project – finding it ‘interesting and remunerative as a side line’ – and no doubt especially so when the series, which included her print, was purchased by the British Museum.

In January 1938 Hodgkins exhibited nine works at the Lefevre Galleries, and in September her lithograph, Arrangement of Jugs, was shown at the Leicester Galleries.4 During the year she also showed single works or small groups of works at three other galleries (including one in Manchester), and two paintings at the Salon d’Automne in Paris in November, but her health was suffering and she feared ‘a complete breakdown’.

To William Hodgkins, 15th October 1938; from F.H., Worth Matravers, Dorset … Another bit of news is that Peep Bowes only daughter has been married… As Alice was supposed to have artistic leanings I sent her a picture – or rather an auto-lithograph, a new process which a group of 20 artists, myself included, has just produced & exhibited at the Leicester Galleries with very great success. My lithograph was one among a set chosen by the Brit: Museum. I find it interesting & remunerative as a side line to my other work.

Written by Jonathan Gooderham & Richard Wolfe.

From Frances Hodgkins to John Piper, 8th September 1941; Studio, East Street, Corfe Castle, Dorset

“… the nicest letter I’m ever likely to have on this earth telling me of all the nice things you and Mr Brown have fixed up for me with the ultimate glory & honour of the inner gallery thrown in - it’s too much greatness … Talking of titles, I feel mine to be banale & inadequate – if Myfanwy and you have some silver words up your sleeve, give them to me".

This is a typical Frances Hodgkins ‘farmyard’ composition, whose identifiable elements include a pair of wheels on an axle, a plough, a barrel and what are presumably other bits of discarded agricultural machinery. The scene appears to depict mechanical equipment that has been put aside and left to stand idle and commune with nature during the war whilst the farm workers were on active duty abroad. In between the various elements, flowers sprout up and in the background a horse drawn plough with harness trace can be clearly discerned before a bank of tall trees representing the woods mentioned in the title.

The Corner of the Woods is reminiscent of a slightly later painting, China Shoe (FH1203, Private Collection), a gouache of 1942, in which still-life objects take on a ‘ghostly quality’ and the composition is animated by an array of calligraphic flourishes. The subtle dark colouring and somewhat mysterious mood connect it closely with British Neo-Romanticism, and in particular with the works of artists John Piper, John Craxton and John Minton.

Wheels, which make a dominant appearance in The Corner of the Woods, were a recurring motif in Hodgkins’ work, and were also common in the neo-romantic and surrealist imagery of the time, as in the work of Paul Nash. The theme had various interpretations, such as suggestions of the self, or modernity, while it could also have an anthropomorphic aspect, with wheel hubs being read as eyes. Such forms are apparent in Hodgkins’ 1942 gouache Broken Tractor (FH1215, Tate), of which Elizabeth Eastmond describes that vehicle’s wheel hubs as looking like “grotesque, anguished eyes.” Broken Tractor was included in the exhibition Gouaches by Frances Hodgkins at the Lefevre Galleries in March-April 1943, along with another following the wheel theme, The Mill Wheel (FH1219, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa), while there were also several Welsh subjects including; Barn Interior, Dolaucothy (FH1209, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa), Green Valley, Carmarthenshire (FH1216, Dunedin Public Art Gallery) and Welsh Farm (FH1226, Dunedin Public Art Gallery).

Hodgkins’ 1943 exhibition, Gouaches by Frances Hodgkins – A new series of Gouaches painted during 1942–3, was held at the Lefevre Galleries, which had recently reopened after closing in July 1940 due to the falling demand for art during wartime and the difficulty of obtaining paintings. With this exhibition Hodgkins was able to realise her long desired aim of presenting a thematically unified display of recent work, in this case produced in the period 1942-3. Her 1943 exhibition was also significant because her paintings were shown alongside another exhibition, Picasso and his Contemporaries, which was a departure at Lefevre, and in so doing it demonstrated her affinities with French painting.