Frances Hodgkins painted Still Life in front of Courtyard sometime in 1929 or 1930. It is titled in this text as it was in its first documented exhibition at St. George’s Gallery, London in 1930. It has also been exhibited in some contexts under the shortened name, Still Life.

The prosaic title provides an accurate description of the image content, which at first glance might seem unusual for still life painting. Though at the time the work was made, positioning still life arrangements in outdoor contexts was reasonably commonplace, and an approach that Hodgkins often took. Writing on this painting, art historian Dr. Linda Tyler stated, “Situating still life subjects in the outdoors was popular amongst the English artists of the inter-war period. […] Frances Hodgkins made it her specialty, often combining flowers and fruit with interesting ceramics. Of her entire output of paintings, nearly 100 are ‘open air still lifes’.”

Still Life in front of Courtyard presents the viewer with an arrangement of objects on a tray, which Tyler describes as follows, “a painted Italian jug, a blue-and-white oriental porcelain dish and a curved blue glazed sweet bowl are grouped with a flowering begonia in its terracotta pot.” These objects dominate the picture plane, occupying the centre and lower right of the image. To the left of the image, a door is depicted. Tyler states, “Its expanse of brown panels and small-paned glass acts as a repoussoir device (like a stage flat in the theatre) to lead the eye into the background.”

The background is occupied by the titular courtyard, which is represented in a few suggestions of line and contrasting colours. The paint handling is suggestive rather than descriptive, giving impressions of the courtyard, while leaving much to the viewer’s imagination. This is also largely true of the still life objects themselves. A central aspect of Hodgkins’ distinctive brilliance is her ability to convey a great deal of visual information through a few deft strokes of paint, a characteristic that is fully on display in this work. Where a lesser painter might have felt impelled to add further detail to make the likeness to physical objects more convincing, Hodgkins confidently let the paint and the viewers on visual imagination do some of the heavy lifting.

Still Life in front of Courtyard was held for many years in the personal collection of British gallerist, collector, and arts patron Lucy Wertheim, who donated 183 works to the Auckland Art Gallery in 1948. More recently, this painting was held in the personal collection of auctioneer Dunbar Sloane.

Oil paintings by Hodgkins are far rarer than her watercolours. Few appear in market contexts. When they do, they are often acquired by collecting institutions. A sister work to this, titled simply Still Life, is held in the Fletcher Trust collection. Another related drawing from c1929 is held in the Tate Gallery collection in the U.K, and the U.K Government Art Collection holds an oil painting titled Flowers in a Vase. Bangor University in Wales also holds a 1938 Hodgkins oil painting titled The Painted Chest. Further still life oil paintings are held by major Australasian collecting institutions, AGNSW, AGSA, AAG, The New Zealand Parliamentary Services Collection, Te Papa, Ravenscar Trust, and Victoria University of Wellington. The standard of these institutions is indicative of how highly prized Hodgkins oil paintings are.

Catalogue number: FH0895