Frances Hodgkins

N05456 LOVEDAY AND ANN: TWO WOMEN WITH A BASKET OF FLOWERS 1915
 
Inscr. ‘F Hodgkins’ b.l.
Canvas, 26 1/2×26 1/2 (67×67).
Purchased from Mrs Hope Smith (Knapping Fund) 1944.
Coll: Purchased from the artist by Moffat Lindner, the father of Mrs Hope Smith, 1915.
Exh: National Portrait Society, February–March 1916 (16), as ‘Loveday and Ann’; Arts Council, Ethel Walker, Frances Hodgkins, Gwen John, Tate Gallery, May–June 1952 (58); Arts Council, provincial tour, 1952 (1).
Lit: John Rothenstein, Modern English Painters: Sickert to Smith, 1952, pp.117–18.
Repr: The Windmill, 1, No.2, 1945, facing p.55; exh. cat., Tate Gallery Continental Exhibition, Rome, 1947, p.32, No.26.

Sir John Rothenstein (loc. cit.) states that this picture was her first oil painting and quotes a letter from the artist written to him on 7 October 1945 from Corfe Castle: ‘In reply to your request for the date when “Two Women with a Basket of Flowers” was painted I think 1915 St Ives is sufficiently accurate - I remember Mr Moffat Lindner liking it so much that he bought it as soon as it was finished and from then on it hung in his beautiful house among the Elite.’ The portrait of Moffat Lindner, 1916, repr. In Myfanwy Evans, Frances Hodgkins, 1948, pl.1 and described as tempera, is somewhat similar in treatment and was also shown in the National Portrait Society, 1916. Mrs Hope Smith wrote (4 December 1957): ‘My father bought the picture while she was still painting it ... and I remember watching her at work on it.... The girls were just two fishermen's daughters, models.’ A label on the back gives the address as 7 Porthmeor Studios, St Ives, where the artist lived from November 1914 till October 1917, except for summer visits for sketching classes.

Published in:
Mary Chamot, Dennis Farr and Martin Butlin, The Modern British Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture, London 1964, I