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This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).
The Croft House, Bradford on Tone shows Frances Hodgkins’ masterful use of colour to capture the spirit and movement of a landscape. Although the sky is grey and moody, this late winter scene is not deadened as you might expect. Instead, the wind whips and whirls furiously around bare trees, stirring up the leaves and grasses into dynamic patterns and textures.
This work was among the last few that Hodgkins painted before her death. She made it during her last visit to ‘The Croft’, a Somerset cottage belonging to her friend Geoffrey Gorer. Hodgkins had been visiting the cottage since the 1920s, and it had become a comforting refuge from coastal gunfire during the Second World War. She painted the cottage and surrounding landscape several times, depicting the place in its different moods. Here, the warmth and solidness of the cottage provides a refuge from the chaotic energy of the storm outside.
Although she was in ill health at the time, the news of the end of the war in May 1945 had left Hodgkins feeling jubilant. She also had several sell-out exhibitions between 1942 and 1946, an upcoming retrospective at the Lefevre Gallery, and was pleased about her inclusion in a forthcoming book in the Penguin Modern Painters series written by Myfanwy Evans, wife of her friend the painter John Piper. It is tempting to read Hodgkins’ sense of optimism into this painting: it is predominantly painted in shades of grey and browns, but she has woven in hints of light blue, buttery yellows, rose madder and soft mint green. After a long, stormy winter, we sense that spring is about to break through.
Hodgkins was nearly seventy-seven when she painted The Croft House, Bradford on Tone but it shows that she never abandoned her vital sense of experimentation. Her work, indeed, grew increasingly abstract through the 1940s, although Hodgkins was always more interested in the inventive possibilities of colour than in fully relinquishing the representational. Her failing health and eyesight created physical barriers to painting, but this work shows that her poetic vision never dampened even at the very end of her life.
Chelsea Nichols