Wilhelmina

In the European summer of 1903, fellow artists Dorothy Kate Richmond (1861-1935) and Frances Hodgkins (1869-1947) spent over a month in Rijsoord, a small Dutch town near Rotterdam. At the turn of the twentieth century, Rijsoord was a regular stop on international artists’ European journeys, many of whom set up camp in the town to observe and paint Dutch scenery and subjects. Richmond and Hodgkins were travelling with a group of artists led by Norman Garstin (1847-1926), the Irish painter and leading figure of the Cornish Newlyn School with whom they had taken painting classes across Europe in preceding years. It is likely that Wilhelmina relates to the time Richmond and Hodgkins spent in Rijsoord in August 1903.

For the artists’ first few weeks in Rijsoord, the weather was terrible. ‘Holland is a low damp country where it rains all day,’ Hodgkins lamented in a letter home. ‘It has been raining ever since we came and will probably go on raining till we leave.’ Hodgkins was also disappointed with the scenery the small town offered for her practice, describing it as ‘a dull little place…Windmills and cabbages and large white sabots seem to be the principal features of the country…there is nothing specially Dutch about the landscape to attract one.’(1)
 
The wet weather and the lack of a ‘specially Dutch’ landscape may have prompted the New Zealand artists to spend time focusing on genre subjects – scenes from everyday life. Hodgkins, after all, describes Rijsoord as ‘only a place for figures and pastoral subjects.’(2) In Wilhelmina, Richmond portrays a young woman sitting beside a window, using the natural light to assist in her knitting. With double-pointed needles, she may be making an item in the round such as a hat or socks. Holding the thread between her fingers, her limp hands, tilted head and soft gaze suggest she isn’t actively engaged in her project, but rather lost in thought.
 
Many foreign artists visiting Rijsoord took to painting local villagers and scenes of everyday life in the Dutch town. Townsfolk often modelled for the artists: in a postcard home, Hodgkins describes having a ‘nice little Dutch girl posing for [her] in orchard.’(3) Richmond probably also solicited a local model for Wilhelmina. Inscribed on the verso of the canvas, ‘Wilhelmina’ was a popular Dutch name, and here likely identifies Richmond’s sitter.
 
Wilhelmina is depicted wearing traditional regional dress, including a keuvel headdress attached to her head with krullen, conical metal spirals.(4) According to Eliza Leypold Good, an American who visited Rijsoord in 1900, these accessories were proudly worn by local women such as Vrouwe Warendorf, the matron of the local hotel at which Garstin’s group was based. Good writes, ‘[Warendorf] contented herself with wearing the simple cone-shaped krüllen made of spiral gold wire. She called our attention, however, to the thickness of this wire, adding that there was none quite so heavy in the village.’(5) Whereas affluent women wore krullen of pure gold, those worn by Wilhelmina may be made of more modest copper or brass. These traditional costumes were of great interest to visiting artists, and some travellers even modelled them too.(6)
 
Richmond and Hodgkins travelled back to New Zealand together in late 1903. The following year, they held a joint exhibition at McGregor Wright Gallery in Wellington, displaying works resulting from their European travels. Among Richmond’s showing were several sketches in tempera of Rijsoord landscapes and Dutch figure studies in both tempera and oil. Wilhelmina may have been among the exhibited works: an oil painting entitled ‘Mina’ is listed in the exhibition catalogue and, at £10.10, it was Richmond’s most highly priced work for sale. Later in 1904, when Wilhelmina was exhibited at the Otago Art Society, the regional newspaper Evening Star commended its ‘delicious softness’ and concluded it ‘must attract all who have an eye for the beautiful.’ The report suggests Richmond’s sensitive approach elevated the genre scene, explaining, ‘The subject is of an everyday character…yet by putting feeling into the painting Miss Richmond has managed to uplift her canvas into prominence.’(7)

Victoria Munn, March 2025

(1) Letter Frances Hodgkins to Rachel Hodgkins, undated, sent late July or early August 1903. Alexander Turnbull Library, MS-Papers-0085-15.

(2) Letter from Frances Hodgkins to Rachel Hodgkins, 4 August 1903. Alexander Turnbull Library, MS-Papers-0085-15.

(3) Letter from Frances Hodgkins to Rachel Hodgkins, 13 August 1903. Alexander Turnbull Library, MS-Papers-0085-15.

(4) Alexandra van Dongen, Dromen van Rijsoord/Dreaming of Rijsoord (Bussum: Uitgeverij Thoth, 2005), 102.

(5) Eliza Leypold Good, ‘A Holland Art Village,’ Catholic World 70, no. 418 (1900): 521.

(6) van Dongen, Dromen van Rijsoord, 107.

(7) ‘Otago Art Society’, Evening Star, 8 November 1904, p. 2.