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Artist: Frances Hodgkins (1869—1947)
Date: 1906
Place: Europe
Media: watercolour on paper
Dimensions: 608 × 436 mm
Catalogue number: 2023–1–15
Credit line: The Field Collection, Toi Mahara

This figure group (usually mother and child) was a favourite subject of Frances Hodgkins and appeared quite early on with her paintings of Māori women with their babies in the late 1890s. In these paintings Frances Hodgkins depicted intimate relationships, affection, and domesticity—the kind of female life from which she was to be excluded in her chosen career as an unsettled artist. Between 1906 and 1912 she painted several compositions on the theme.

This is an astutely observed composition: the young woman, cheek resting on the obliviously sleeping child on her lap, seems to be listening to the conversation in the room. Frances Hodgkins achieves the feeling of the figures’ weight and solidity with an economical use of detail, using a restricted palette of creams and pinks to depict the figures and suggest the intimate bond between them.