Three French Sailors by Frances Hodgkins

About the time she painted this work Hodgkins wrote to her mother from the Hotel Belle Vue in Montrieul-sur-Mer, 'This little inn is mostly filled by fishermen who come about this time for the fly-fishing . . .'

The subject shows the way Hodgkins always made the most of her itinerant life, depicting people and places she came across in her travels. The early 1920s was a period of experimentation for Hodgkins when, under the influence of French painting, she worked towards her own modernist style.

The influence of Matisse and Derain is evident in Three French Sailors, with its boldly juxtaposed complementary reds and greens and coloured contour lines. But there are also touches that were to become the hallmarks of Hodgkins's later works – the floating patches of colour and calligraphic brushstrokes that are both decorative and descriptive.