Date: 1892
Place: Waikanae
Media: watercolour on paper pasted on to board
Dimensions: 380 × 610 mm
Catalogue number: 2023–1–28
Credit line: The Field Collection, Toi Mahara
Isabel Field’s coastal view with distant Kāpiti Island shrouded in cloud has similarities in subject and style to her father William Mathew Hodgkins’ landscape paintings. She has applied the paint in washes and added details with a brush so dry that the surface resembles pastel or chalk.
Although Frances Hodgkins is recorded as saying that Isabel’s painting had a ‘cunning slickness’ and was perhaps ‘too clever and facile’, she did admire her sister’s early work. In 1907 she wrote to Will Field, ‘…I have been getting a great deal of pleasure out of a picture by Sis…, one of her pre-matrimonial pictures astonishingly good and clever.’ (Linda Gill, Letters of Frances Hodgkins 1993, p204).
(Sourced from notes by Avenal McKinnon, Frances Hodgkins, the link with Kapiti: The Field Collection, Mahara Gallery, 2000).
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