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Overview
Frances Mary Hodgkins (1869-1947) was a painter chiefly of landscape and still life, and for a short period was a designer of textiles. She was born in Dunedin, New Zealand, but spent most of her working life in Britain. She is considered one of New Zealand's most prestigious and influential painters, although it is the work from her life in Europe, rather than her home country, on which her reputation chiefly rests. Her work over a career of over 60 years shows a fascinating evolution from realism to modernist semi-abstraction, and she was an outstanding colourist. She is well represented in Te Papa's collection.
Hodgkins loved the countryside and this included depicting farming actitivies. Threshing or ‘thrashing’ – the older term for it – seems to have been a favourite subject since the list of her exhibited works shows several works with similar titles; the Dunedin Public Art Gallery has a more 'abstract' version, dominated by colour patches, which dates from about a decade later, and the Auckland Art Gallery owns Threshing Machine, of a similar date.
A large traction engine dominates the composition - coloured lilac and here showing Hodgkins's unorthodoxy as a colourist even in this relatively early work. Groups of farm workers feed wheat or other grains into a threshing machine. Others using pitchforks then hurl the stalks onto an ever-growing haystack on the right: from the watercolour it still appears roughly constructed. The warm summer day would have been full of sound, the men’s voices shouting over the roar of the engine and the threshing machine, and the clatter of the elevator as it carried the released grain upwards, before it fell below, freeing the chaff to blow in the wind.
The swirling brushstrokes are stylistically characteristic of this period, and are seen in a better known work in Te Papa's collection, The hilltop (1913-0003-1). The painting originally belonged to the family of Wellington businessman, print collector and major benefactor to the National Art Gallery, Sir John Ilott (1884-1973), and it was given to Te Papa by his daughter, Mrs Suzanne McKellar, in 1999.
Sources:
Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki, 'Threshing Machine', https://www.aucklandartgallery.com/explore-art-and-ideas/artwork/22042/threshing-machine
Dunedin Public Art Gallery, http://collection.dunedin.art.museum/search.do?view=detail&page=1&id=24723&db=object
Linda Gill, 'Hodgkins, Frances Mary', https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/2h41/hodgkins-frances-mary
Dr Mark Stocker Curator, Historical International Art August 2018