Goose Girl

Artist: Frances Hodgkins (1869—1947)
Date: 1905
Place: Paraparaumu
Media: watercolour on paper
Dimensions: 715 × 532 mm
Catalogue number: 2023–1–13
Credit line: The Field Collection, Toi Mahara

The model for The Goose Girl, Alice Berreti, was fourteen when she was painted by Frances Hodgkins. She lived at Pudney Farm with her parents, which was in Paraparaumu near the railway line.

My father was Italian and passed on to me red hair. I thought it was awful. One day, Willie Field’s sister-in-law Frances Hodgkins and friend Dorothy Richmond came to Paraparaumu for a holiday. They saw my red hair, thought it was beautiful and asked me to sit for them so they could paint me. I used to carry their paints and easels. The painting she did for me was named ‘Babette’, it was put in the academy and won a prize. I was born in 1891, and came to live in Paraparaumu in 1896. We lived in a house by the ramp—we had 2 acres of land to farm. But my father was a fisherman first. When he gave that up he worked on the roads until he died in 1912. We had lovely dances in Wise’s hall. My father used to play the accordion. My mother grew all the fruit for jam making, apples, pears, peaches. We had cows for our own milk supply. George Hamilton Grapes came from England. He grew all kinds of fruit including grapes. He used to stop the train, board it then sell bags of fruit to passengers.

From Olive Baldwin, The Celebration History of the Kāpiti District, 1988.

The Goose Girl has become a key work in the Field Collection. The other painting made of Alice, Babette, is now in the collection of the Dowse Art Museum, Lower Hutt. The house where Frances and her friend Dorothy Kate Richmond stayed on their painting holidays still exists.