NZ art curator and Frances Hodgkins' expert Mary Kisler has helped authenticate a lost painting by the acclaimed NZ artist. Photo / Jason Oxenham
NZ art curator and Frances Hodgkins' expert Mary Kisler has helped authenticate a lost painting by the acclaimed NZ artist. Photo / Jason Oxenham
A lost painting by New Zealand art great Frances Hodgkins has been authenticated by BBC show Fake or Fortune, with the help of former Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki curator and Hodgkins expert Mary Kisler.
The painting was bought by Robjn Cantus for £35 (c$79) in a Hertfordshire CountyCouncil auction of its mid-20th Century art collection in 2019. It has now been valued at £50,000 (c$112,500). Robjn Cantus blogged about the painting.
Art blogger Robjn Cantus purchased the Frances Hodgkins painting for £35 at an auction in 2019.
Soon after his online purchase, art blogger Cantus posted about the painting, which the auctioneers had attributed to English artist Vera Cuningham. He was messaged saying it might be a Hodgkins.
Much of the episode is dedicated to retracing Hodgkins’ life in Britain, where she spent much of her career until her death in 1947. It also goes looking for the possible site of the abstract landscape – a mine entrance – among the Roman gold mines of rural south Wales, and the local inn where she stayed, as recorded in her letters.
Kisler appears on the show via video link from Auckland to verify that the painting is a Hodgkins.
“I emphatically think it is by Frances Hodgkins,” she tells Cantus and the show’s presenters, Fiona Bruce and Philip Mould. “You can read Robjn’s painting as fitting into a really large number of Hodgkins’ works. When you lay those works side by side, you can see absolutely that Robjn’s work fits among them.”
Kisler says she wonders if the painting is October Landscape, a piece exhibited at the Lefevre Gallery in London in 1943 alongside works by Pablo Picasso.
“It’s a damn good one,” Kisler says of the painting. “I’d love to have it myself.”
Sky Television which screens the series in New Zealand on its Sky Arts channel and is currently showing last year’s season of Fake or Fortune? says it is investigating with the BBC whether the broadcast of the latest season can be brought forward.
Sky also has available the 2024 documentary Frances Hodgkins, Anything but a Still Life, by New Zealand-based filmmaker Blandine Massiet du Biest available to Sky Arts subscribers on its SkyGo platform.
