Exhibition: Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox – 14 March – 10 April 1990 – Eliot Hodgkin: Painter and Collector
Article: Eliot Hodgkin: Painter and Collector by Charlotte Gere
Publication: Apollo Magazine, March 1990

It was a measure of the seriousness with which Eliot Hodgkin pursued his career as a painter that his friends mew nothing of it but the results. No one was ever received in a paint-bespattered studio. He did not possess such a self-indulgent amenity: his minutely detailed – usually small- scale – works were executed at an immaculately organized table in his bedroom. He did not enjoy arty gossip, and remarked in a letter to Sir Alfred Munnings, giving his reasons for refusing election to Associate of the Royal Academy, that he did not really care for the conversation of ‘brother brushes’. Munnings replied, ‘I have read your long letter, and much of it is what I think also and what most of us at the Academy think. The most tiresome members are the ones who are the most “artistic”.’
Having chosen a minutely realistic style and an immensely demanding technique he was compelled to work slowly and with intense concentration to complete his paintings. He told one gallery owner who was importuning him for a one-man show that it would take seven years to build up the necessary number of works. He did have one-man exhibitions after the war, but he could have relied on private commissions from a whole network of patrons. The work eventually took its toll of his eyesight and it was with a sense almost of release that he gave up painting in 1979 at the age of seventy-four, feeling that he had done enough.
Eliot Hodgkin was born on 19 June 1905 at Purley Lodge, near Reading. The family were of Quaker origin, part of a cousinage including the Frys and the Cadburys, some of whom were to become his patrons. The Quaker strain was of significance, particularly in encouraging the extreme modesty in relation to his own artistic achievement that was so characteristic of the rare discussions he permitted about it.
After Harrow he had been expected to enter the family engineering works, but he was determined not to do this and went to London to study painting. He started at the Byam Shaw School and then went to the Royal Academy where he continued to study under the accomplished draughtsman, Ernest Jackson, RA, the principal of the Byam Shaw School. His earliest commissions were for mural decorations and for only two years before the war he taught mural painting at the Westminster School of Art. The very stylish mural decorations capture precisely the spirit of the period – but ‘Vogue Regency’ rather than ‘Curzon Street Baroque’. Not elaborately illusionistic, the emphasis was on the purely decorative, with much use of flowers and occasional excursions into architectural fantasy. An early commission for the decoration of the Caveman Restaurant at Cheddar Gorge brought him briefly into contact with the architectural avant-garde. Lord Weymouth (now the Marquis of Bath) assembled an impressive young team to carry out his ideas. The concept was largely realized by Russell Page; Geoffrey Jellicoe was the architect and Gordon Russell provided the furniture. Geoffrey Jellicoe memorably described Eliot’s decorations as depicting ‘early man in cheerful mood”. After the war Eliot was able to give up mural painting and devote himself entirely to easel painting. The last mural commission, for the loggia at The Manor House in Farm Street, was executed in 1947.
The brief account of the artist’s life – brief at his own insistence – in the Tate Gallery catalogue makes no mention of his youthful membership of the Pandemonium Group. Several exhibitions were staged by Sir Nigel Playfair and the newspaper reports give a flavour of high spirits and humour that he may have come to regard as irrelevant to his later career. However, in 1934 Eliot saw the painting he exhibited at the Academy given favourable mention in the press and from that date we can trace the steady development of his personal style as a painter.
In 1936 he had his first one-man show at the Picture Hire Gallery. The same year saw the purchase by the Chantrey Bequest of a large flower painting, October, now in the Tate Gallery. In 1937 he adopted the tempera medium, an infinitely more painstaking method than oils, and one that makes no allowance for corrections or second thoughts. His knowledge of the technique came from Maxwell Armfield, one of its leading practitioners who had taught him at the RA Schools and whose own Manual of Tempera Painting appeared in 1930. Eliot’s eighth tempera work, Undergrowth (I941), shown at the Academy in 1943, was another Chantrey purchase. The most ambitious works of the 1940s were the series of paintings of the City of London showing the bomb-damaged sites overgrown with wild flowers (Fig.1). They come as a poignant reminder in the fiftieth anniversary of the London Blitz.
The war-time works were painted in the intervals of fire-watching duties as an air-raid Warden. After the war Eliot was able to establish the routine of working at home and on annual trips abroad which he followed for the rest of his career. His RA picture of 1946 was to be the most surreal of his studies from nature, an extraordinary work called The Valley of the Shadow; seeming to depict steep cliffs and chasms, it is in fact a minutely observed study of a fallen tree trunk.
In the 1950s Eliot began to concentrate mostly on still-life, and in this he might be said to have found his most characteristic means of expression. It was almost too successful, for he was hard put to it to satisfy the eager demand for these supremely attractive small-scale works. Offerings of subject-matter would frequently be left on the doorstep of his house, and he laboured, sometimes against a considerable disinclination, to satisfy the seemingly interminable requests for flowers, or feathers, or eggs. The careful and analytical arrangements of natural objects were painted – often on a piece of board no larger than a postcard – with intense concentration in several sessions of four or five hours’ work.
Eliot’s own reluctance to allow a retrospective exhibition in his lifetime came from modesty. When Michael Shepherd chose to include his work in a Critics Choice exhibition at Arthur Tooth’s in 1972, he must have expressed a fear that this would reflect badly on Shepherd’s judgement as a critic. In a reassuring letter Shepherd relayed to him the many favourable comments he had received on the chosen works. Neither such assurances nor the continuing demand for his paintings shook his resolve and it is only now after his death that it has become possible to mount the sort of exhibition that he deserves.
Eliot was an artist-collector in the old-fashioned tradition, but his collection, a selection of which is shown in the first floor gallery at Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox, should not be seen as an extension of his own artistic personality. Occasionally he was persuaded to buy paintings because they perfectly complemented his own, like the studies of mushrooms by Hamilton or the Valayer- Coster roses, but his taste was remarkably catholic ‘ though his wife was even more adventurous, especially when it came to non-European art. The ownership of a work of art gave him the pleasure of physical possession and the insight afforded by prolonged contemplation in all lights and at different times of day. But since he could indulge his passion for acquisition only by disposing of one thing in order to buy another, the range of his taste was never fully represented by the status quo. However, some of the finest things – the Delacroix, the Ingres portrait drawing (Fig. 2), the Liotard pastel and the Degas study of Helene Rouart were not to be parted with.
This is not the place to attempt a description of his personality, but two quotations may give some hint of its flavour:
Hearts that are delicate and kind and tongues that are neither – these make the finest company in the world. (Logan Pearsall Smith)
He was naturally witty, well educated, without pedantry, and the inexhaustible mirth of his character made him the most amiable man who could be seen in society. (Mme Vigée-Lebrun of Hubert Robert)

By Charlotte Gere. Reprinted with permission from the March, 1990 issue of Apollo Magazine. www.apollo-magazine.com