Exhibition: Picture Hire – October 1st until 24th 1936 – Eliot Hodgkin
Article: British Art Professor’s First Show at 74 by Pierre Jeannerat
Publication: Daily Mail, 6 October 1936

… An artist who speaks thus to an art critic is no ordinary dabbler. It was thus that Eliot Hodgkin, aged 32, spoke to me at his first one-man show at Picture Hire Galleries, Brook street, W. He is keen, youthful, enthusiastic, and, let it be added at once, uncommonly talented. He scored a deserved success when the Chantrey Trustees bough a work of his for the nation at the last Academy show.

Offered a safe business job by his father, he chose art as a career and began with fashion drawings to earn money. He has taken the right road and is evidently not going to shirk any of its difficulties. He promises to go a long way and to be worthy of the memory of his cousin, the late Roger Fry, one of the best connoisseurs England has had.

Hodgkin has a quick eye for the ready-made compositions which life offers to the wandering painter, as shown by “Window at Hyeres“ (No. 17). “The straw hat, the bottle of sunburn oil, the wide view outside were too good to resist,” he said.

Red poppies seen against a stormy sky, probably while he was lying in the grass on “Worthy Down” (No. 6), gave him another chance, which he did not resist or miss. “The Forest” (No.7) has ruffled undergrowth like a maiden’s hair in the wind.

By Pierre Jeannerat. Reprinted with permission from the October 6, 1936 issue of the Daily Mail.