Auckland University Press & Oxford University Press, 1982. Reprint. Good used condition with dust jacket. Previous owner name inside.

Frances Hodgkins (1869–1947) pursued an unusually long and venturesome career from late nineteenth-century Dunedin, where she enjoyed a modest reputation, to London during the Second World War when critics were describing her as a ‘master colourist’ and ‘one of the most remarkable woman painters of our own or any country’. She was never content to remain at one stage of her development. Almost before each had found acceptance she moved on to another, often leaving admirers behind as she went. It was the practical growth of a dedicated painter: theory and dogma interested her little.

A rich pictorial record remains of Frances Hodgkins’s pilgrimage, in her paintings and in photographs, which is used to great effect here alongside E. H. McCormick’s elegant and scholarly text. Portrait of Frances Hodgkins is not a full biography, but fills a need for an accessible account of the artist’s career. It makes full use (as do the captions to the pictures) of her own vivid letters.