Following Frances — Frances Hodgkins Artist and Paintings Top

FOLLOWING FRANCES | A series of vignettes exploring places where Hodgkins lived & painted | Click to view →

Jonathan Gooderham

Frances Hodgkins at Chipping Campden, 1916

In the summer of 1916 Frances Hodgkins set out in search of a suitable village from which to set up and give some painting classes. Basing herself in the small town of Evesham, she explored nearby villages on a hired bicycle, finally deciding upon the quaint market town of Chipping Campden in Gloucestershire.

Above: Noel Arms, early 1900s, Jesse Taylor Collection

Hodgkins took accommodation at the historic Noel Arms Hotel, where Charles II is said to have rested after his defeat by Cromwell at the battle of Worcester. She wrote to her mother on June 22nd: ... After a hot climb up the Cotswolds I found this place as dear a little grey town as you could wish to see & such a nice Inn & landlady who understands our temperament & feeds us well & simply.12

By July Hodgkins was kept busy with a ‘thriving’ class and the promise of greater numbers in August. Not much time to spare these days. I am on the go early and late ... I have a cold bath at 6.30, get my letters & answer them before breakfast, when we all assemble to discuss the order of the day - then out till 1. o'c, after lunch a siesta & again to work after an early tea - dinner at 7.30.3

However, in August she began to grow tired, writing of her pupils: They are a dull lot of human beings, & I ... curse secretly at having to lay out so much strength & energy into such unpromising material.4 By September she was ‘brain fagged’ with ‘nothing left in the reservoir’ and was very much looking forward to saying goodbye to her students.

Frances Mary Hodgkins c. 1920

In a letter to her mother dated September 9th, Frances wrote of finally being able to take time and finish her paintings for an upcoming exhibition: A short line to say I am well but very busy finishing off pupils who depart tomorrow ... I stay on till the end of the month finishing my picture for the International, then back to St Ives ... The country is looking sweet now - the horrible greens has gone ... I am on a large picture of bathing boys. There is a pool in one of the fields, rather public, & I have to dodge the villagers & especially the Superintendent of Police who suspects I have some stunt up my sleeve not quite. I bribe the boys to bathe at 1/- a head & buns all round - I have to go like the wind for fear of being caught, but I have nearly finished now. The pool is really rather a mud hole & full of rats, but it has a lovely old, ruined gateway near it & makes a pretty picture for a pastoral.5 Frances Hodgkins held her painting classes in Chipping Campden that year 1916 from June to October, then the following year 1917 she was in Burford between June and July, in Great Barrington in the Summer of 1919, returning to Burford between 1921 – 1923.

Juliana’s Gateway 1908

The painting referred to by Hodgkins is the lively Lady Juliana's Gateway, see below. On a past trip to the UK, the author, having walked over three fields and waded through two brooks, found the ruined gateway. His resulting photograph is shown below, alongside Hodgkins' watercolour

Frances Hodgkins’s 1916 painting, Lady Juliana's Gateway. Private Collection, Auckland, NZ

Essay published in: Signpost - Chipping Campden History Society

The ‘old, ruined gateway’ present day

Bridgnorth

Bridgnorth

Surmounting the High Town of Bridgnorth stands the ruins of Bridgnorth Castle, begun in the 12th century by Robert de Belleme, Earl of Shrewsbury. Today, it leans at a perilous angle, a beloved folly standing in the midst of Victorian gardens. One of the reasons Frances Hodgkins delighted in Bridgnorth (she taught there over several summers between 1926 and 1932) was the variety of views and combinations of architectural and natural forms that were readily available.

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A Personal Perspective

A Personal Perspective

It is springtime in the Cotswolds as I drive from Stow-on- the-Wold along lanes edged with dazzling white blossom of hawthorn hedges and descend into Burford’s main street of honey coloured stone houses. Over the medieval packhorse-bridge I turn left into Lawrence Lane and hold a 1920s postcard up to the scene. The church with its tall spire still dominates the view but to the left I realise the old stone wool barn that Frances Hodgkins made her home and studio in 1922 has been replaced by a modern house.

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The Weir at Bradford-on-Tone

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The Weir at Bradford-on-Tone

In June 2017 Jonathan Gooderham set out for Somerset to locate Geoffrey Gorer’s cottage and the weir on the River Tone, depicted in Hodgkins painting River Tone, Somerset c. 1939, pictured above.

Armed with an old listing for the sale of The Croft and a post code Jonathan drove into the small village of Bradford-on-Tone and parked outside St Giles Church. He set off on foot for the small stone bridge that crossed the River Tone. Having walked the riverbank for half a mile to the west, he realised that he was walking in the wrong direction. He retraced his steps, walking next to a beautiful field of golden wheat, listening to the ambling tone of the river which gradually increased in volume. The volume intensified and around the next bend in the river Jonathan spotted the water cascading down a weir (a barrier across the width of a river that alters the flow characteristics of water and usually results in a change in the height of the river level).

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A tramp on Dorset’s Jurassic coast unearthed the background to a much admired portrait of Frances Hodgkins. 

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Hodgkins lived in Worth Matravers from 1936 – 1939, and painted some of her most important oils in a studio converted from a garden shed in the village.

Linda Gill (ed.), Letters of Frances Hodgkins, 23 July 1937, Letter to Rée Gorer, Sea View Cottage, Worth Matravers, Dorset. 

‘I started life here with a studio shed in the garden and one room – now I have spread over half the farmhouse & occupy quite a good little 3 roomed flat which I am decorating & simplifying to a labour saving bareness – with electric light & anthracite stove in the offing – to be installed before the winter. The house is a one time Vicarage, of the starkest kind, it never has had one single debonair touch – It overlooks the channel.  The mornings are lovely and I want to paint even before I have finished breakfast’.

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'The Nook' at Bodinnick-by-Fowey

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In August 1931 Frances Hodgkins decided to leave the bustling city of London for a quieter life in the country and consequently moved to ‘The Nook’, Bodinnick-by-Fowey in Cornwall. In a letter to Dorothy Selby, Frances wrote, ‘The Nook is neither of the “Rookery” or the “Cosy” sort but suits my needs – no other fool could stand it.’ Frances painted the surrounding countryside relentlessly, as she feared her contract with galleries in London might be terminated because of the ever-worsening depression, caused by the stock market crash in 1929. Her hard work paid off and in February 1932 she exhibited with the Seven and Five Society and later that year with the Salford Gallery near Manchester, and also with Zwemmer, Tooth’s & Wertheim galleries in London.

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