Leaves and Tubers

Living in the heart of London, Hodgkin witnessed first hand the desolation caused by the Blitz. From the gutted buildings he saw that a plethora of plant species had appeared, and he wrote to Kenneth Clark asking for work which, 'will make some use of my special abilities - such as they are - and be a bit less uncongenial than the civil service ... It has occured to me that possibly no pictorial record has so far been made of colonization of London's bombed sites by wild flowers - willow herb, ragwort etc' (see Exhibition catalogue, Eliot Hodgkin 1950-1987 Painter & Collector, London, Hazlitt Gooden & Fox, 1990, p. 16). This metamorphosis from urban civiliziation to untamed nature was an inspiration to Hodgkin, who depicted the beauty he saw in the vegetation thriving amonst the ruins. Tate Britain holds a 1941 tempera on canvas of the same series, entitled Undergrowth.