A Sense of Time Place and Hope
In the opinion of a reviewer of the Canterbury Society of Arts’ 1888 exhibition, one work that stood out was a watercolour, Marguerites. Executed with ‘consummate skill’ and ‘admirably wrought throughout’, this flower study was ‘not only beyond comparison superior to any work of the kind here’ but ‘on an altogether higher plane of art’.1 It was the work of Dunedin artist Isabel Hodgkins, who later that same year received an award from the jurors for another watercolour shown at the Melbourne Centennial Exhibition. Her painting career flourished until the end of the century, but by then had been overtaken by the demands of marriage to lawyer William Field, motherhood and a busy social life. She may have been unable to realise her full potential as an artist, but that challenge was about to be taken up by her younger sister, Frances.
In 2020, 132 years after its public debut, was included in an Auckland exhibition celebrating the community of artists centred on Frances Hodgkins. In addition to four works by Hodgkins herself, this selection included 15 by other practitioners, mainly women, who were born in New Zealand and who had a preference for watercolours. All were associated with and supported
