Howard Hodgkin

Exhibited by Piano Nobile

Material Oil on wood

Dimensions 43.5 x 48 cm

Place of Creation UK

Status Vetted

About the Work

Small Rain is a glutinous, pulchritudinous painting from a mature phase of Howard Hodgkin’s career, begun around 1980, in which he defined a new idiom by painting the frame of his paintings. It was painted using a narrow palette of richly saturated colours, likely manufactured by the colour-maker Michael Harding. The frame is predominantly painted at the surface in earth green. Bright green shows through in places beneath the darker surface, over which terre verte was scumbled around some of the edges. On the central panel within the painted frame, wide brushstrokes of sunshine yellow are surrounded and edged with a lighter hue of terre verte, which was applied wet-on-wet. Underlying colours and brush textures are partially visible at the surface, and these indicate earlier phases in the painting’s development. Although the paint was applied mostly in smooth, extended strokes of a wide brush, the interstices of the frame’s mouldings are somewhat gummed with accretions of coagulated paint. Small Rain creates a pictorial effect of enclosed space, partially revealed by unfolding layers of literal and representational framing. The title and subject-matter of the painting are characteristically veiled, but an erotic subtext is implied by the title Small Rain, which is a quotation from a Middle English poem called Westron Wynde.

In the years since Hodgkin’s death, it has become increasingly apparent that homosexual desire was a recurring undercurrent in his work. He claimed that his paintings were evocations of a specific memory or emotional scenario: ‘the problem is making the picture stand up by itself, because the memory has to be translated into a thing, an object’. He preferred not to reveal the content of these memories; to do so would have compromised the integrity of painting and reduced it to mere illustration. Yet the clues provided by his titles are sometimes revelatory. The phrase ‘small rain’ was used in a short Middle English poem:

Westron wynde when wyll thow blow?

the smalle rayne downe can Rayne.

Cryst, yf my love were in my Armys

And I yn my bed Agayne!

This short lyric evokes the speaker’s longing to be in bed with their lover. The mood is one of gentle regret. There is tension between the rain-swept present and the warmth and intimacy of the recollection. As the poet and English scholar Charles Frey interpreted, ‘the nostalgic ending presents an almost-despairing emphasis upon gaps between past comfort and present pain.’ As Frey wrote in an article of 1976, the phrase ‘small rain’ is ambiguous and liable to be interpreted in different ways: ‘thin, biting’ or ‘fine, gentle’. The smoothly applied brushwork and translucency of Hodgkin’s painting may imply that he favoured the latter reading.

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Provenance

Anthony d'Offay, London
Caroline Conran, London
Piano Nobile, London

Literature

Howard Hodgkin, exh. cat., Anthony d'Offay Gallery, 1999, no. 11, p. 35 (col. illus.)
Marla Price, Howard Hodgkin: The Complete Paintings: Catalogue Raisonné, Thames & Hudson, 2006, no. 345, p. 330 (col. illus.)
Julia Marciari Alexander and David Scrase, eds., Howard Hodgkin: Paintings 1992–2007, exh. cat., Yale Center for British Art, 2007, no. 9, p. 102 (col. illus.)