Landscape with still life

New Zealand-born Frances Hodgkins travelled to Europe in 1901 and by the late 1920s she had forged a successful career, exhibiting with leading British Modernists as a member of the Seven & Five Society between 1929 and 1934. Initially a group of seven young painters and five sculptors, the membership grew to fifty-six and included Ben Nicholson, and in later years Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth. In 1939 she was included in the British Pavilion of the Venice Biennale.

During the 1930s Frances Hodgkins experimented with fusing two painting genres, landscape and still life, to create works with an unsettling, ambiguous quality. Hodgkins painted this work in December 1930 at Bradford-on-Tone, in Somerset, England. The palette of green, brown and maroon evokes the cold climate of Winter. The strangeness of the work is in part due to Hodgkins’s deliberately unclear description of space. Painted from a high vantage point – such as a balcony or second-storey window – the foreground is a ‘still life’, while the upper part of the composition presents a landscape.

Maria Zagala, Curator of Prints, Drawings and Photographs