Summer Joys

Artist: Frances Hodgkins (1869—1947)
Date: 1916
Place: St Ives, England
Media: oil on canvas
Dimensions: 600 × 690 mm
Catalogue number: 2023–1–25
Photographer: Paddy Riley
Credit line: The Field Collection, Toi Mahara

In 1914 Frances Hodgkins left France and took refuge in Cornwall for the duration of the First World War. Curtailed by war restrictions from painting the coast or landscape, and confined to her studio by the St Ives climate, she turned again to figure painting and portraiture, and began to paint in oils.

Eric McCormick notes that ‘Summer Joys…introduces a perennial subject and illustrates a number of tendencies. Painted in oils, it is a study of sunlight diffused through a green parasol. More significantly it is a design linking the figures of mother and child with the patterned fabrics of dress and furnishings. (Had Frances Hodgkins been looking at Vuillard who also exhibited with the International?)’ (Eric McCormick, Portrait of Frances Hodgkins, 1981 p87).