B.
Happy birthday
Behind the scenes
Colonel Harland Sanders was born today in 1890.
So to mark the occasion, here's a tasty morsel from the collection...
Frances Hodgkins Girl feeding poultry. Watercolour. Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, purchased 1958
There is a serious side to this. If you have a look at the Hodgkins painting in our Collection Online, you'll see the new CATEGORIES area. While we are closed we are busy adding these descriptive labels - much like subject headings in a library catalogue - so that you can find works according to what they are about, rather than just by the name of the artist or by the title they have been given.
It's early days, so not everything has these tags yet, but already some interesting sets of works have emerged which have little in common except their shared depiction of, say, trees, or children, or snow, or, as in this case, birds.
The vocabulary we are using is the industry standard Getty Art and Architetcure thesaurus.
Related
Collection
Frances Hodgkins Girl Feeding Poultry
Early in her career Frances Hodgkins painted a number of farmyard scenes. On show in the 1890 Canterbury Society of Arts exhibition, Girl Feeding Poultry was the first work she ever exhibited.
Painting in an academic style, Hodgkins has focused on detail, showing the influence of the training she had from her father, William Mathew Hodgkins, who was a part-time watercolourist.
Hodgkins was born in Dunedin and studied at the Dunedin School of Art. In 1901 she left to study at the London Polytechnic. In 1903 Hodgkins exhibited at the Royal Academy, the first New Zealander to have the honour of being ‘hung on the line’. Living in Paris between 1908 and 1912, she taught at the Académie Colarossi, the first woman on the staff there. Hodgkins travelled between New Zealand and Europe until 1913 when she settled in England. Throughout her career she exhibited with many art groups and galleries, including the Lefevre Galleries in London from 1932.