Threshing Machine
Date
circa 1919
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Object Detail
Catalogue number
FH0624
Other titles
Thrashing
Date
circa 1919
Brief Description
After the end of World War I, Frances Hodgkins painted a series of watercolours while staying in the village of Great Barrington, in the Cotswolds. In each of these paintings, a large traction engine dominates the composition, while groups of farm workers feed wheat or other grains into a threshing machine. Others using pitchforks then hurl the stalks onto an ever-growing haystack on the right. The warm summer day would have been full of sound, the men’s voices shouting over the roar of the engine and the threshing machine, and the clatter of the elevator as it carried the released grain upwards, before it fell below, freeing the chaff to blow in the wind. There is a sense of timelessness to the scene, a return to age old traditions after years of war.
Medium
gouache, pencil and charcoal
Dimensions
548 x 704 mm
Inscription
Signed lower left: Frances Hodgkins; inscribed (on verso): white panel (in another hand) Thrashing, no 462 (in another hand)
Collection
Institutional number
2015/6
Credit line
Auckland
Art
Gallery
Toi
o
Tāmaki,
bequest
of
Jetta
and
Bruce
Cornish
Provenance
Mrs Eric Newton, London, England, 1980.
Jetta Cornish, New Zealand, until 2014.
Jetta Cornish, New Zealand, until 2014.