Frances Hodgkins

This exhibitionbrings together a number of paintings from the Dunedin Public Art Gallery’s collection, from the late nineteenth through to the mid-twentieth century, which share aesthetic, conceptual and historical links with the ideas and practices of Impressionism.  The French Connection takes its visual cue from a suite of Frances Hodgkins paintings that reflect the artist’s deft ability at distilling the essence of the most fleeting moment, or gleaning the most lasting effect, from the simplest of everyday situations. 

Boutique in scale, the exhibition is arranged in a series of thematic groupings.  It moves between the intensely coloured and patterned bourgeois interiors of Edward Le Bas and Henri Le Sidaner, to the incandescent and lyrical worlds expressed so effortlessly in Signac’s Port de Saint Tropezand Hodgkins’ Mill House, Ponterwyd, through to the meditative accounts of toiling washerwomen and thriving marketplaces. 

Added to this lively mix is the Gallery’s recent acquisition of Lucien Pissarro’s Landscape through Trees, Tilty Wood, which reflects the gradual diaspora of the tenets and teachings of early Modernism, changing the way people saw and understood their own world.

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