Cherry tree at 'The Croft', Bradford on Tone, Taunton

‘The last time I saw her … she gave me a painting of my cottage with the flowering cherries and pear trees in bloom, a most lovely painting and almost the last she ever completed.’
Geoffrey Gorer wrote this of the work that Frances Hodgkins painted during her last stay at his cottage before she died.

Hodgkins has translated her pleasure at the spring scene into delicate colour with exuberant stabs, loops, and flicks of the brush. She has delicately balanced surface pattern and depth – the painting is nearly abstract, but not quite. ‘I think I’ve got it. Do you feel it? There’s growth, and spring, and hope; do you feel it?’