The garden door

Francis Dodd (1874-1949), portrait painter, landscape artist and printmaker, was born in Holyhead in Wales, the son of a Wesleyan minister. He trained at the Glasgow School of Art alongside his better-known contemporary, also represented in Te Papa's collection, Muirhead Bone, who married Dodd's sister. At Glasgow, Dodd won the Haldane Scholarship in 1893 and then travelled around France, Italy and later Spain. He returned to England in 1895 and settled in Manchester, becoming friends with the leading modern architet Charles Holden before moving to Blackheath in London in 1904.

During World War I in 1916, he was appointed an official war artist by Charles Masterman, the head of the War Propaganda Bureau. Serving on the Western Front, he produced more than 30 portraits of senior military figures, many of which are in Te Papa's collection in the form of postcards. However, he also earned a considerable peacetime reputation for the quality of his watercolours and portrait commissions. He was appointed a trustee of the Tate Gallery in 1929, a position he held for six years, and was elected as an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1927 and a full Member in 1935. From 1911 Dodd lived at Arundel House in Blackheath, South London, until he took his own life in 1949.

The drypoint Looking at a Picture is an intimate portrait of the painter Susan Isabel Dacre (1844-1933). Susan Isabel Dacre, sometimes called 'Aunt Susie'�, was a friend and collaborator of Dodd. In the late 19th century she was very active in the women's suffrage movement. Subsequently Dodd and Dacre worked closely together, first in Manchester, then in London, between 1897 and 1911, when Dodd  married. Dacre, who was Dodd's senior, greatly encouraged him. He portrayed her several times, for example in another drypoint, <em>Looking at a Picture</em> (1907), <em>Winter afternoon </em>(Te Papa 1958-0003-13) and in a much later oil portrait in the Ferens Gallery, Hull (1925) where Dacre is in her eighties. Here 'Aunt Susie' is depicted in a  black dress - which gives the print an effectively bold silhouette - and an elaborately veiled hat. Susan Dacre never married, so this could not be seen as 'widow's weeds'. Her countenance looks benign, which seems appropriate given her friendship with Dodd. The juxtaposition of a woman, open door and garden is also seen in Dodd's <em>Hilda</em> (1965-0001-7).

See:

<p<a href="/entity/g1hb_dlv2k" data-gacategory="annotation" data-gaaction="clicked" data-galabel="assetpage_injected_link_v1">>Fondation Custodia - Collection Frits Lugt, https://www.fondationcustodia.fr/26-Francis-Dodd-308

Wikipedia, 'Susan Isabel Dacre', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Isabel_Dacre

Wikipedia, 'Francis Dodd', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Dodd_(artist)

Dr Mark Stocker   Curator, Historical International Art    April 2018