07.10.20 - CRITICAL STUDIES - Art impacted by Photography


Dorothy Hodgkin - Maggi Hambling, 1985

National Portrait Gallery


This oil painting was done by Maggi Hambling in Nobel Prize winner Dorothy Hodgkin’s home study in Warwickshire. It depicts Hodgkins engrossed in her work, with a structural model of insulin in the foreground. I think this portrait is influenced by photography in many ways, firstly due to the two pairs of hands. They show activity and energy which relates to the way we were better able to understand movement as a result of photography, by taking several photos and studying each frame of the action occurring. It shows the passing of time in a similar way to photographic time-lapses and this gives the painting a sense of animation and dynamism.

Early photography brought about the realisation that light had substance, and this grainy effect in photographs translated into paintings through dots of colour, more naturalistic light and shadow, as well as depth of field. I think Hambling’s painting embodies a similar blotchiness that became popular during the rise of impressionism, as seen in Pissaro’s ‘Boulevard Monte Martre’ (1897) for instance.

Photography also allowed us to capture the ordinary and mundane aspects of life. While this piece was indeed commissioned in the same way that artists were historically, it conveys something so much more realistic and candid - a glimpse of Hodgkin’s actual life which feels very personal, unlike the staged and controlled paintings of monarchs and other ‘important’ people before the invention of photography. This intimacy is cradled by the composition of the image, the subject surrounded by personal objects, books and folders with a disorganised pile of sheets on the desk. There is little separation between her work and personal life, showing how immersed she is in the realm of science and discovery.


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