The year 1928 was something of a high point for expatriate New Zealand artists in London. Auckland's Sun said they had been ‘unusually prominent’ in recent exhibitions, under the headline ‘New Zealanders Hold Their Own in Art World’. Unsurprisingly, it was Frances Hodgkins who received most notice, and her show of oil paintings at the Claridge Gallery was ‘much discussed by the intelligentsia’. One reviewer considered it less successful than her previous outings, while conceding that some pictures had ‘a strange beauty and significance’. The problem was that the artist had become ‘a modern of moderns, and only a keen student of “advanced” art can fully appreciate her work’. To a lesser extent than Hodgkins, fellow New Zealander Owen Merton had also ‘changed and modernised his manner’, as was evident at his recent exhibition of watercolours at the Leicester Galleries.1
Also on show in London at that time, at the Abbey Gallery, were Roland Hipkins and Jenny Campbell, who were born in England and Scotland respectively and immigrated to New Zealand in 1922. But the same reviewer considered them ‘artists of much less experience’, noting rather cruelly that ‘three painters, at least, appear to have used [Hipkins’] signature, and two of them are rather crude’. At the same time there was a much more favourable review of the recent showing by a fifth New Zealander, Frederick James Porter. He was included in a retrospective exhibition of the London Group—of which he was vice-president—at the New Burlington Galleries, in London's Burlington Gardens.2
The London Group had been founded in 1913 by young artists, including Walter Sickert, Jacob Epstein and Wyndham Lewis. Aimed at promoting modern art, they opposed the art establishment, as represented by the Royal Academy which resisted innovation and European developments. In his catalogue essay, Group member Roger Fry described the years covered by the 1928 exhibition as ‘one of the most eventful episodes in the history of British Art’, a time of ‘daring experiments in the search for new possibilities’.3 The 54 current members of the London Group—who included Frank Dobson, Mark Gertler, John and Paul Nash, William Roberts, Walter Sickert and Frederick Porter—provided 266 artworks for the 1928 exhibition.4
On the basis of his contribution, Porter was described as not being a maker of ‘pretty’ pictures, for they displayed a ‘certain roughness and lack of surface charm’. But he was ‘untinged with eccentricity’, and had ‘a notable gift’ for landscapes. His paintings in this exhibition were on loan from the collections of ‘two
