William Matthew Hodgkins, 1833-1898

Turnbull Library Record, Volume 11, Issue 1, 1 May 1978, Page 7

William Matthew Hodgkins, 1833-1898

JANET PAUL

The art collection of the Library has been enriched by a most generous donation. Mr Peter Field, Mrs Audrey Gabites and Miss Joan Hodgkins, have given a collection 0f230 watercolours, pencil and ink drawings, colour notes and sketches done by their grandfather, William Matthew Hodgkins. This augments an original Turnbull purchase of a group of William Hodgkins’ watercolours of Akaroa and Banks Peninsula, and adds considerably to previous donations and long term loans of papers, sketchbooks and photographs from the Field and Pharazyn families. The earlier W. M. Hodgkins collections in the Turnbull Library have been used and often chiefly valued for the light they throw on the early life and aesthetic education of the painter’s famous daughter, Frances Mary Hodgkins. This new collection is also closely associated with this daughter. She owned it. The Hodgkins family believe 1 that she had selected a group of her father’s work to keep with her in Europe. Whether she took them with her when she first left the country three years after William’s death, or whether she chose the work on a return visit—perhaps when the family shifted house in Wellington early in 1905 —is not clear.

We do know that these watercolours and drawings were with Frances Hodgkins until her death in 1947 and that the collection remained in England with her trustees, John and Myfanwy Piper, until it was returned to New Zealand in 1977. This selection throws double light on the technique of both father and daughter. Frances Hodgkins chose material as a painter: she kept studies, ideas to be elaborated, numerous observations, colour notes, experiments with the media, rather than finished work, and paintings most closely associated with their family life. Places around Dunedin: Saddle Hill, Portobello, Port Chalmers, Logan

Park Quarry, views of the garden or from the verandah of the Hodgkins’ house ‘Waira’ at Ravensbourne. She kept, too, monotone wash studies, rather stilted and romantic, done for the Art Club. William Hodgkins was one ofthe originators and host to this group of Dunedin watercolour painters who met on an evening each week during winter. They worked to set themes. Dr E. H. McCormick in The Expatriate gives a delightful imaginative reconstruction of an Art Club evening. 2

With no great effort we may imagine details ofthe setting—the draped, cushioned, congested drawing-room, the plush-covered chairs, the Axminster carpet, the walls with their watercolours (trophies of‘outdoor study’ in summer), the reputed Rembrandt, black with age and grime, the ancestral likenesses brought out from ‘Home’. We can picture the little group working intently round the blazing log fire: the genial rotund figure of Mr Hodgkins in the seat of honour executing his sketch with confident mastery; Miss Holmes, bustling, kindly, dominant, ready with censure but equally ready to praise; silent, absorbed Miss Jenny Wimperis on the hardest chair in the coldest corner of the room; Dr Scott working away with the business-like precision he would have brought to his anatomical dissections. Two hours pass, and, as the servant-girl unloads the groaning supper-trays, there follow the comments and the post-mortems. ‘The foreground’s nicely done, but aren’t those clouds a trifle out? And isn’t itjust a little lacking in atmosphere?’ Miss Wimperis shrinks back to her corner, conscious of yet another failure. ‘A fine bold sunset, Miss Holmes, worthy of Turner!’ The company has its doubts about Dr Scott’s carefully incised ruins, but opinion is unanimous that Mr Hodgkins, as usual, has created a small masterpiece. ‘What atmosphere! A little gem of pure poetry!’ And Mr Hodgkins triumphantly produces exactly the right quotation from his inexhaustible repertoire.

The subjects of William Hodgkins’ Art Club studies have titles which required observation and imagination: ‘Fishermen pulling in a catch’, ‘Women gathering firewood’, ‘Soldier in uniform’, ‘On Peninsula Road’, ‘Waiting’. Some of the Dunedin landscapes may well also have been done with the Art Club. In summer the members ‘devote themselves to outdoor study’, William Hodgkins had explained in an account printed in the Otago Daily Times. 3

Of non-Dunedin work Frances Hodgkins gathered landscapes of the South Island coast and alpine hinterland and descriptive, anecdotal drawings like ‘A bit of old Queenstown’, or mining scenes connected with Macetown, the Shotover and the Maryborough mine.

Among the inscribed watercolours are two groups which record sea journeys: one as far as the head of Thompson Sound in 1875; and the other a short but intensively-documented trip to Stewart Island, on Christmas and Boxing Day 1895 which shows that William Hodgkins, at sixty-two, had lost none of his enthusiasm for painting. Seven watercolours are dated and an undated picture of waves breaking over rocks, ‘Roaring Bay, Starling Point, Bluff Harbour’, may belong to the same trip. Eight watercolours in two days,

sufficient evidence of mental stamina as well as enthusiasm. The first of the group, inscribed ‘the Stewart Island trip; on board the Wakatipu. Christmas Day 1895’ is a lively record, and a delightful reminder that the painter was also a barrister and well-versed in observing character and expressive gesture. The painter here has the advantage over a documentary photographer as he had the time to choose and make an amalgam of characteristic postures. Frances Hodgkins made observations of

similar wit and more incisive line, in drawings of people at a pension table in 1930 or a group of card players in ‘Cafe Les Martigues’. 4

The identified items number one hundred and twenty-seven. 5 There is a second group of ninety-four watercolours 6 mainly unfinished, of unnamed places, mountain landscapes and colour notations which give information about William Hodgkins’ attitudes and techniques. They are experiments with the effects of superimposing one colour on another with combinations of colours most likely to effect a precipitation and studies using this granulation (particularly of an ultramarine or prussian blue with a brown madder) to suggest the texture of rocky surfaces or tree bark, trial runs with wide brush strokes on wet paper, notes of rain storms and cloudscapes. The Hodgkins donation also includes a small group of family photographs and three of William Hodgkins’ sketchbooks: two collections of drawings done on various-sized papers and pasted into an exercise book —most are in pencil, some in ink or watercolour. They give an invaluable view of the man and the varied things which interested him: clerks writing in the Court, heads of witnesses; cab horses; work on wharves, in mines, in the shearing shed, or ‘at a Folding Machine Caxton Office’. William Hodgkins was a traveller and made quick notes of people, of tug boats and mail coaches as they moved about. Here are records of some of the remote mining towns he visited and, in one book, a delicate pen drawing of a mountain lake signed ‘N. Chevalier 1882’. The only

other foreign hand in the collection is a fairly vapid watercolour by John Gully. Two drawings done for the frontispiece and Plate 1A of a Report on the geology of Otago (1875) by F. W. Hutton are initialled W. H. They are almost certainly done by Hodgkins. An annotated printed catalogue, an unusual reference, is inscribed on the cover ‘W. M. Hodgkins. My Private Catalogue of the NZ S. Seas Art Collection’. Inside it is interleaved with tiny watercolours and drawings, copies by Hodgkins of some of the paintings in the exhibition, noting their colour or quickly suggesting their composition. This book is an excellent example of the way an artist’s papers can increase our knowledge of the taste in painting of a given period.

These freshly-avariable studies and paintings may allow W. M. Hodgkins a less stereotyped role in the history of New Zealand paintings as something other than Frances Hodgkins’ father. His reputation has had a variety of assessments. During his lifetime his work was warmly admired, and the generous support he gave to amateur painters, to the Dunedin Society of Arts and to the growing town’s aesthetic education was readily recognized. William Hodgkins had been an initiator and foundation member of the Otago Art Society, formed at a meeting held in the Athenaeum on 13 December 1875. Even here it was reported that when prizes were mooted, Mr Hodgkins took a different view.

They should encourage art for the sake of art. His idea was that, instead of taking funds for prizes, they should try and form a valuable library [of books on art]. Excellence in a Society like this for some years must be comparatively not of a high standard . . . they should . . . bring people together who had one common feeling . . . and not allow themselves to be led away with the idea of gaining medals. 7

William Hodgkins, during his busy life as a lawyer and a father, acted on his opinions. He organised the showing of British and European painting in Dunedin’s industrial exhibition of 1889, promoted the building of Dunedin’s first gallery, inspired the Art Club, lectured on painting and worked for seventeen years as president of the Otago Art Society, corresponding with painters in New Zealand, Australia and England and arranging for the exhibition and sale of their works. 8 He was generous with his time and his enthusiasm. In selling his own works he was less successful. In a letter to Cissy, his daughter Isobel Field, he asks her to try to sell some of his paintings which had been exhibited in Sydney. ‘Never mind sticking out for the price I put on them —£25 each I think, or was it £2O? I forget but if you can get anyone to take them I think it would be better than their coming back. When I think of the hundreds and hundreds of pounds worth of pictures I have sold for artists and the trouble I have taken with their works it makes me a little sore that when I want to sell my own I find such a difficulty . . .’ 9 In an earlier letter he had expressed that continuing worry of painters, framing: ‘I sold my little grey Wakatip [x/c] ... to MrJ. D. Dunn for £8.8.0 as I was anxious to pay for frames’. 10

The worth of Hodgkins’ activity was widely recognised in his own day. At the twenty-first annual meeting of the Otago Art Society the secretary, Dr Scott, reported that since 1875 twenty exhibitions had been held, a Society which had had seven people interested in its formation had now one hundred and sixty members, that it had ‘sold £4,875 worth of paintings and acquired others valued at £1,020 . . . displayed on the walls of the Public Art Gallery’, and that ‘the erection of the Gallery itself was largely owing to the efforts made by the working members of the Society’. 11

That he was chief among working members, in regard and in effort, is made clear in the letters and notices which followed William Hodgkins’ death on 9 February 1898. The Otago Daily Times in its obituary gives a contemporary assessment of Hodgkins’ reputation as a painter: ‘he ranked as a worker in watercolours with two of the greatest of New Zealand artists —-John Gully and J. C. Richmond’. 12 The Christmas issue of the Otago Witness in a warmer and more informed tribute gives a picture of ‘this large-hearted man’ who was:

a sympathetic and kindly friend of all young artists, aiding, encouraging and supporting them . . .Mr Hodgkins was entirely self-taught. . . Art with him was a hobby, and not a trade, and during nearly the whole of his life it was his custom, not only to spend his holidays in sketching excursions, but to rise very early in the morning, and spend hours in his studio, when the rest of the world was asleep. He painted almost to the day of his death and the unfinished picture which was upon his easel when he died is perhaps one of his finest works . . . There can be no doubt that Mr Hodgkins’ art work became stronger and better as time went on . . . if he had given up his whole life to his art he would have been a famous painter ... in his special medium (watercolour) he was an acknowledged master, and none of our younger artists have yet approached him in delicacy and precision of tone. The charm of his work consists chiefly in the exquisite tenderness of the colouring, the delicacy of graduation and tint; also the fine atmospheric effects. 13

This was the comment of a contemporary with a detailed knowledge and appreciation. Later judgments have type-cast William Hodgkins as one of those nineteenth century painters ‘who saw in the landscape only a reflection of that of Europe’ for whom it was ‘natural to apply to these [New Zealand] subjects the forms, light and colours of English, Scottish or American landscape painting’. 14

While grateful for the research and discrimination which made pioneering judgments in the history of the visual arts here, it is perhaps now possible to make some re-appraisal from the greatly increased evidence of original and, until now, unknown works. The watercolours in the Hodgkins family donation do not suggest an insensitive application of alien forms and colours, but rather an acute observation of character and a very finely-tuned sense of colour nuance. In his handling of the medium William Hodgkins

shows a sophisticated understanding and a rare verve. These paintings show no mere tourist painter working to a foreign formula but a man with a delicate appreciation of place and natural forms. An earlier assessment in the centennial history series by E. H. McCormick backs this view. He says:

Hodgkins was less concerned with scenic beauties than either Gully or Richmond and showed greater emancipation both in technique and the use of colour. One of the virtues of his work is that it is not painted from some eyrie of the imagination. Hodgkins was not obsessed with size and grandeur, and his mild impressionism was a far more effective means of delineating the New Zealand bush . . . 15

Only ‘mild impressionism’ may be a slightly misleading term because we tend to implicate its use with the epithet ‘impressionist’ as first used by a group of French painters in 1876.

By that time William Hodgkins had been painting in New Zealand for sixteen years and, although passionately interested in the work of his contemporaries, he could have had no first-hand experience of the work of Monet, Sisley, Seurat or even Boudin. But it is possible that he had been influenced to move away from the English tradition of‘stained drawings’ by his experience of French painting in Paris and by his profound study of the Turner collection at Marlborough House in London. 16

The English watercolour tradition (other than Cotman and Turner) is one of clear washes of colour lightly superimposed over pencil drawing or a monochrome grey, and then the intensity and detail built up, with colour wash over dry wash and touches or thin brush lines of darker colour. It is the method used by most of the competent painters working in watercolour in New Zealand in the nineteenth century. But William Hodgkins has a stronger palette and prefers not to build up washes but to paint forms directly with a broader brush, drawing tree shapes and shadows over still-wet washes. He controls and manipulates run colour and makes use of the fortuitous effects from granulation of strong colours.

In the dash and vigour of his brush stroke he may have learned something from the watercolours of Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863) who used watercolour brilliantly for direct studies of animals and people and preliminary sketches for large works in oil. Delacroix seldom painted landscapes in this medium but two very subtle, direct watercolour landscapes by him were exhibited in Paris in 1855. 17

Another French watercolourist with whose work Hodgkins has much in common is a curator at Versailles, Frangois-Marias Granet (1775-1849) two hundred of whose watercolours were bequeathed to the Louvre. 18 Like Hodgkins, Granet used wide areas of muted colour, drew directly with a brush, suggested trees in silhouette. His subjects were of Paris, and especially of Versailles, where Hodgkins had also lived and worked, according to a testimonial, ‘during the years 1855-56 in assisting the late Captain Denny at Versailles, in a literary work of some magnitude . . .’ 19 It is not fanciful to assume that Hodgkins would have absorbed knowledge of the handling of watercolours from these two French painters, Delacroix and Granet, and that his own work introduces into New Zealand an attitude to painting more European than English. His enjoyment of the medium, his quick sensibility, his wit, above all, his accurate eye for colour, for hues of brown and green on swampy flats, for the green light of early mornings, for sunshine on snow, or the close-toned blues, browns and olive greens of bush painted in the late afternoon, these are his particular gifts, his contribution to an infant landscape tradition. His drawings make an autobiography

telling of his warm amused enjoyment of the human predicament. Henry James, in an essay on the Wallace Collection, 20 quotes John Opie’s reply to a youth who asked him with what he mixed his colours; William Hodgkins could also have replied, ‘with brains, sir!’ And he might truthfully have answered, ‘with love’.

REFERENCES 1 Conversation with Mr Peter Field. 2 E. H. McCormick, The Expatriate (Wellington) 1954, p. 12. 3 Otago Daily Times, 20 November 1880, p. [s]. 4 E. H. McCormick, Works of Frances Hodgkins in New Zealand, 26a and 26b. 5 Art Coll. AlB2. 6 Art Coll. A 213. 7 Otago Daily Times 14 December 1875, p. 2. 8 For amplification of his activities, see E. H. McCormick, Works of Frances Hodgkins in New Zealand, p. 5-14. 9 MS Papers 113 [Field]: 11. William Matthew Hodgkins to Cissy 31 January 1889.

10 Idem, 12 December 1888. 11 Otago Daily Times, 22 December 1896. 12 Otago Daily Times, 10 February 1898. 13 Otago Witness, December, 1902. 14 G. H. Brown and Hamish Keith, An Introduction to New Zealand Painting 1839-1967. Collins (Auckland) 1969, p. 22. 15 Letters and Art in New Zealand, Wellington (1940), p. 100. 16 Otago Daily Times, 20 November 1880. 17 Two pages from his Sketchbook, 15 September 1855, reproduced in From the sketchbooks of the great artists (New York, 1972) p. 247. 18 Louvre Inventory, 26.882. 19 MS Papers 113 [Field]: 6. Mr Warwick Mitchell to William Matthew Hodgkins, 8 October 1859. 20 Henry James, The Painter’s Eye (London) 1956, p. 72.