PROVENANCE Mrs M Hill, Wellington, purchased Redfern Galleries, London, September 1945. Original Redfern Gallery label affixed verso Private Collection, Purchased at Webb's, Auckland, 06 December 2011

REFERENCE p. 209 E H McCormick, Works of Frances Hodgkins in New Zealand, Auckland City Art Gallery

Frances Hodgkins database number FH0795 completefranceshodgkins.com

In the first half of 1927, Frances Hodgkins taught in Manchester, before travelling to Tréboul in Brittany to join friends and fellow artists Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines. The year had been difficult, and she was exhausted from teaching both day and night classes, so sailed from Liverpool to France, rather than undergoing the lengthy train journey. Hodgkins had been planning the trip for some months, relishing the thought of collaborating with friends whose critiques and suggestions she respected. Since first meeting at the end of WWI, both Cedric and Lett had encouraged Hodgkins to experiment, and it was possibly their influence that made her leave aside the lyrical watercolour technique that we are more familiar with in her works produced before WWI.

Accordingly, Hodgkins started to apply watercolour and gouache with dry oil brushes, evidence of which we can see in Mother and Child in those passages where the paint is applied thinly on dry paper, with little dashes and dabs, rather than washed or blended in. She has left the paint as a thin wash on the mother's arm, however, so that the rapid pencil strokes beneath are visible. It is an unusual composition, the young mother tentatively gripping the edge of the baby's shawl, the baby's scrunched up little face seeming to reflect her parent's unease.

When Eric McCormick was conducting his original research on the works of Hodgkins in the 1950s, he assumed that Mother and Child had been painted around 1935. Often when Hodgkins adopted a more experimental way of painting, she would produce a series of works, only to abandon the technique and move in a different direction. Fortunately, dating such works becomes easier once you are able to consider them in their entirety.

Mother and Child was acquired from Redfern Galleries, London, in September 1945 and subsequently brought back to New Zealand where it has remained. A larger painting from the same series, Seated Woman FH0806 Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, was gifted to illustrator Vivien Doyle and her husband, who were Morris and Lett-Haines's landlords at The Pound at Higham, Suffolk, where Hodgkins stayed in 1930. Vivien Doyle died in 1932, thus the paintings were evidently produced before that date. During Hodgkins' stay in Tréboul in 1927, having done at least four works in a similar staccato style, she changed to use broader brushstrokes and wetter pigment, but there can be no doubt that these first works became the catalyst for new developments in her technique.

MARY KISLER