The Piano Lesson

In 2007, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki acquired 20 watercolour paintings by expatriate New Zealand artist Frances Hodgkins. Painted in the first decade of the 20th century, they were hidden away in a drawing folio before the original owner’s family discovered them in 2007. Although the family now live at Montfort l’Amaury, west of Paris, historically they had properties in Brittany, where Hodgkins ran her summer schools until 1912.

When Hodgkins exhibited similar watercolours in Sydney and Melbourne in 1912–13, she told a reviewer how she had gone to England in 1901 looking for colour and light. Unable to find it, she ‘fled to France’, where she attended Norman Garstin’s sketching class at Caudebec-en-Caux. However, it was her trip to Morocco the same year that proved a turning point. Mediterranean culture provided Hodgkins with a simplicity of architectural forms, sparkling light and strong colour, all elements of what eventually became her own highly individual style. Even when painting in the damper climate of Belgium and Holland, the memories of southern France and North Africa influenced her scenes of bustling marketplaces and intimate vignettes of everyday life.

In The Piano Lesson, vertical washes have been used to rapidly map the walls of the large salon in which these women are sitting. The windows are thrown wide open to the garden beyond, allowing cooling breezes to enter. Curving lines of colour dance and tumble across the middle ground, and while the two figures at the piano are clearly defined, the woman bending over the table on the left takes longer to identify. This may have been acquired or given as a gift to the owner, as Hodgkins often only signed a work when it had been purchased, or she was presenting it as a gift.

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