Frances Hodgkins and Grace Joel — one is a well-known artist, the other less so, but they both came from Dunedin and both fought for their place as artists in a male-dominated world.
In late 19th century England, a woman’s place was still in the home; yet on the other side of the world, Dunedin was a city with a progressive attitude towards the education of women, was home to New Zealand’s first major art school and had a number of popular art clubs and the Dunedin Art Society.
"It was a city that was very encouraging of a younger generation participating in both visual arts and the expanded art context," Dunedin Public Art Gallery curator Lucy Hammonds says.
Parents of the first-born New Zealand generation were keen for their children to learn arts and music, whether through private tutoring or in the public school system.
The gallery’s latest exhibition, "Groundbreakers", intends to take people back to that critical moment in the art history of Dunedin, to the 1880s and 1890s, a time of great change, both in the way artists were looking at their surroundings and their work, and in their lives, she says.
Born into this were Hodgkins (1868-1947) and Joel (1865-1924).
Hodgkins’ story of being born into an artistic family, the daughter of William Mathew Hodgkins who was at the centre of many of the city’s artistic activities, is well known. Joel’s family on the other hand, while supportive, had no artistic leanings.
While Hodgkins began painting at a young age, it is thought Joel discovered her passion for art later on.
"But actually Hodgkins continued to sort of fight and assert her belief that she wanted to have a full-time art career and be a painter, and that was what she laid down early in her life."
They were among other artists in the community such as Catherine Holmes and Annie White, names that are unknown to many, but whose work is among the Hocken’s Collection and the Alexander Turnbull Library. Their work is also shown in the exhibition.
"It was quite an empowered generation of women. I think that's something that's been quite interesting in looking at the different stories is these were women sort of fighting for their own place as artists, but they were well supported by their whanau."
Curator Lauren Gutsell says the exhibition highlights the different challenges people faced in maintaining their artistic careers.
"So you have artists who, women artists in particular, that have art careers at a point in time and then they might have had families and their art careers sort of take a back seat. And then you've got artists like Frances Hodgkins and Grace Joel, who laid down a lifetime commitment to being full-time practising artists."
Hodgkins’ career, both in England where she travelled frequently and New Zealand, is well researched and celebrated.
Hammonds says Hodgkins did not operate in isolation. Joel was a figure who was particularly interesting to look closely at, because the two had distinct approaches.
![Untitled [back of female half nude] 1893, and A Young Girl in Blue Holding Primroses c.1895, by...](https://www.odt.co.nz/sites/default/files/story/2024/12/gb_install4.jpg)
One of the major differences between the two was that Joel left Dunedin when she was in her early 20s to go to Melbourne to study at the National Gallery School. She returned a few years later to do more study.
"And this is a time where Australia's art is changing as well and Australia is forming a very strong, homegrown, impressionist movement. So she was learning in the thick of that and bringing those ideas back to Otepoti in her work. So she returns here in the early 1890s as a very accomplished artist."
In conducting their research, the curators discovered how connected Dunedin and Melbourne’s artistic communities were at the time. A lot of that centred on Melbourne’s Centennial Exhibition in 1888 and the New Zealand and South Seas Exhibition in 1889-90.
"We realised there are many figures within this exhibition, whether Mathew Hodgkins, Isabel Field, Frances Hodgkins, Grace Joel among them, whose work was being exhibited in both places and who were also travelling between Melbourne and Otepoti."
Gutsell says at that time, artists’ approach to landscape painting mostly involved surveys of the view, depicting places so they could be sent back to Britain and Europe to show what New Zealand looked like.
"Then things became far more centred in the artist's experience of place as something that was more perhaps personal and focused around everyday life."
Joel, on the other hand, prioritised the figure throughout her career, beginning at the National Gallery School. It was at a time when lecturers prioritised the figure yet access to drawing figures in the nude was different for males and females.
"And in Australia, within art schools, women artists could paint from living nude models from 1885, whereas in most places it was still very controversial and not appropriate for women to be depicting the nude and working from the nude," Hammonds says.
One of the works in this show, which is an untitled back of a female nude, painted in 1893, while Joel was at the National Gallery School, won her the Ramsey Prize — and as far as the curators can tell, she remains the only woman to have won the prize.
"So that was a work within Joel's practice that we really wanted to prioritise, bringing into the context of this exhibition, because it shows so many things around how she depicted the nude, what her arts education afforded her practice, and then how that tracked forward for the rest of her career.
There is not as large a body of Joel’s work as there is of Hodgkins and it is not as well collected. While Joel is recognised for her specialist skills in figure and nude painting, her reputation did not grow as quickly as Hodgkins’ did with her depiction of everyday life.
"Both of those things had radical elements about them, but they were different, and I suppose that's why looking at them in parallel to one another is interesting," Hammonds says.
The women both left Dunedin within a year of each other, Joel returning home in 1906 and Hodgkins in 1903 and 1912, but they spent the rest of their lives in Britain and Europe.
Gutsell says Joel’s first stop was a Paris art school, the first to admit women artists, which also gave its students access to male and female nude models.
Hodgkins went to London, spent some time studying at the City of London Polytechnic before heading to France where she did watercolour classes.
"I suppose there was this relationship in how they were both asserting themselves into spaces that were usually afforded to men, they were both often looking to mother and children, or women at work as subject matter in what they were doing."
They both began to exhibit in prestigious art academies and salons such as London’s Royal Academy, London Salon and the Paris Salon.
Hodgkins was cementing her position in the 1920s as a key modernist artist working in Britain and was invited to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale.
"In contrast to that, Grace Joel died in 1924, and she was in her 50s at that time, and so I suppose what we assert is just the difference in that end part of their careers," Gutsell said.
In part due to Hodgkins being a prolific letter writer and maker of work as she needed the funds to survive, it is easier to trace her work in private and public collections but Joel’s history is harder to trace as it is much more fragmented.
Hammonds says it has been a rewarding exhibition to work on as it does focus on two artists who have a claim on being great innovators in terms of New Zealand’s art history.
"Hodgkins is by and large I think the most well-known and celebrated and successful artist of her generation internationally, and I think Grace Joel has a really strong claim to be a leading figure in the introduction of Impressionist techniques into Aotearoa and hasn't really been fully and widely credited as such in terms of a New Zealand-born artist trained in the southern hemisphere and bringing those ideas at a high level back into this country."
The exhibition also provided an opportunity to look at some of the other artists who were around at the time and the motivations driving them.
"So I think one of the other stories that I've really enjoyed in the exhibition is that of Nellie Hutton, who was a really excellent painter and one of the daughters of the founding art masters of the art school. But what's fascinating about looking at her works in this exhibition is that when you're looking at how she paints the landscape versus how she paints the figure, you've got a very conventional approach to landscape painting that's quite anchored in a previous generation and a very expressive and loose approach to figure painting, which is, for its time, really innovative and experimental."
Another is Jenny Wimperis’ painting, which is a view of Dunedin, the harbour and the developing city.
Hammonds and Gutsell think it has a strong claim to be among the earliest acquisitions of paintings made in New Zealand in that European landscape tradition made by a woman artist.
It was painted in 1885 and collected in 1924.
"So when you start tracking our New Zealand painting collection, it's a very, very early example of the work of women painters working here."
TO SEE
Groundbreakers: Grace Joel, Frances Hodgkins and the new art of Ōtepoti, until April 27, 2025
