B.

Brought to light, November 2009- 22 February 2011

Hodgkins visited Spain several times throughout the 1930s, spending time at Ibiza and Tossa de Mar. On one visit to Ibiza, where the weather often swung drastically between huge storms and blue skies, she mentioned in a letter to the artist Karl Hagedorn that: ‘… in this clear ivory light every object looks important & significant – I wonder what you would make of subjects up here – things appear in stark simplicity minus all detail – nothing corked up (bouchée) or hidden as in the grey, or brown light of the north.’

The Dunedin-born Frances Hodgkins was running her own watercolour painting school in Paris when World War I broke out in 1914. She relocated to St. Ives in Cornwall, where she found many displaced Belgian families also living, and painted this work in response to their wretched plight. Unshatterable, one of her first oil paintings, was exhibited in London in 1916 and purchased by the painter Sir Cedric Morris. Dr Rodney Wilson, the Gallery’s director in 1980, visited Morris, and with assistance from the National Art Collections Fund, a British art charity, successfully secured this work for the Christchurch collection.

(Treasury: A Generous Legacy, 18 December 2015 – 27 November 2016)