By the time she made this picture, still life had become one of Hodgkins’ favourite types of composition, and this is one of her most distinguished in that genre. Sometimes called Pumpkins and Pimenti, it was painted in the coastal village of Tossa de Mar, Spain. That it was purchased by Sir Kenneth Clark, at that time a very big cheese in the British art establishment, and selected for the Penguin monograph on Hodgkins that Myfanwy Evans submitted for the artist’s approval before publication (Frances Hodgkins, 1948), indicates the high value that the artist herself and her contemporaries put on this work.

This standing is endorsed by the work’s inclusion in the project that gave it the form seen here: these Ganymed Facsimiles reproduced original artworks in colour collotype of a sufficient quality “for display in Art Galleries, Museums, Universities, etc., throughout the world”. The company provided specially designed frames to enhance the works’ artistic effect, and the Tate Gallery was happy to put its name to them. Hodgkins was included in the second list offered, whose thirty-one artists ran from William Blake to Pablo Picasso. 

The emergence of the present work calls for a revision of the often-heard remark that Arrangement of Jugs (lithograph, 1938) is Hodgkins’ only surviving print, and gives further evidence of her standing in the British artworld in the years following her death.