In Search of Peace

Louisa Hodgson 1905 - 1980

Summary

A precisely painted scene of a suburban house and garden. It is a view of the artist's own home in Tynemouth, near North Shields, Tyne and Wear.The house in the foreground to the left has the nearmost wall removed as if part of a stage-set or similar to a dolls' house. The interior of a sitting room is revealed with figures seated around a wireless, and the bedroom above with someone trying to sleep in bed. A group of two men and two women are outside in the garden, walking away from the house towards a neat lawn with a small tree and bluebells at one side. A gardener stands close by on a vegetable patch. A street is clearly visible behind them, and a large building in the centre background with a long window wall revealing an office board meeting in session round a long table. To the right is another large building with its nearmost wall removed, revealing it to be a cinema projecting a picture of two lovers kissing. It is the Carlton Cinema in Tynemouth which operated in an old chapel building between 1936 to 1976. Picture palaces appeared on every High Street providing escape from hardship through the glamour of Hollywood.To the left, behind the house, the streets of houses tail off into open hills. In a letter to the art gallery from the artist dated October 1936, Louisa Hodgson wrote of this painting: "I have endeavoured to paint a record of the present time, accepting things as they are and I do not pretend to force an opinion in any way. Owing to the rush of modern life and the general craving for peace, I have selected a few of the oustanding means of escape. Beginning with the section of the house on the left of the panel, in the lower room a man is trying to read while the wireless blares forth the latest dance music and a man returning from the office hesitates in the hall before entering. He is returning from the office tired and weary and expects peace and rest rather than the noise of the wireless. Above, a man in bed, a night-shift worker, tries to sleep but is disturbed by the noise below so counts sheep - the recipe for insomnia. In front of the house are four young people who have spent the day in the country. One of the party has pulled a large bunch of bluebells and, seeing some white and pink ones in the garden, proceeds to rob the gardener of these in order to add them to her collection. The gardener finds pleasure in contemplating the row of young green peas, in the background his beehives suggest the joys to come from flowers and honey. In the centre background is a building in the lower room of which a group of men sit talking. A peace conference is suggested by the reproduction of 'Pax' by Lorenzetti. On the left of this building is a distant view of factory chimneys and, leading away from the are, a ribbon-built road. On the right of the conference room, old houses are being demolished to make way for the new. Finally, the large building on the right is a local cinema, a converted chapel where on the screen two lovers not only find peace but satisfy the demands of the general public". Louisa Hodgson was born in Tynemouth in 1905. She studied and later taught art at King Edward VII School of Art at Armstrong College (later King's College and now Newcastle University). In 1928 she won a scholarship in Mural Painting at the Royal Academy Schools in London.This painting was exhibited at the Royal Academy (No. 900) in 1936 and purchased from the artist later that year. According to Hodgson, it was painted in response to the general criticism that modern artists do not paint what they see around them. So she painted a personal expression of Modernism in the 1930s. It was the decade when suburbia boomed in Britain with an average of 30,000 new homes built; when the middle classes left the inner cities for homes with gardens on quiet streets. She included a ribbon-built road whereby houses were built during the 1920s and 1930s along the roads and railways that radiated out from urban centres and into the countryside. Louisa Hodgson also included a copy of a detail from the 14th century painting 'Pax' (Peace) by Ambrogio Lorenzetti (1285-1348), part of a fresco cycle which decorates the walls of Sala della Pace in Palazzo Pubblico, Siena, Italy. The allegorical figure of Pax is reclining on a divan holding an olive branch. Yet under her cushion on which she rests are poorly concealed weapons of warfare. Just like late medieval Tuscan society, war is not far from disturbing the peace. Louisa Hodgson spent her last years as a virtual recluse which may explain, in part, why she is not better known as an artist today.