Panorama brings together works from the Dunedin Public Art Gallery collection by Frances Hodgkins, her contemporaries, and other artists working in Europe and the United Kingdom in the late 19th and early to mid-20th centuries. Traversing subjects that frequently appear in Hodgkins’ works — from rural landscapes, to port and harbour scenes, to portraits and views of the interior — the exhibition widens the view of Hodgkins’ international context. It also presents works that span the French avant-garde, the Scottish colourists and British modernism to celebrate the depth of the Gallery’s international collections.

Although the group of artists present in Panorama were not necessarily known to one another, all made works with shared and sometimes overlapping contexts. Leslie Hunter, John Piper, and David Jones present alternative views of the rural landscapes and agricultural machinery that is a critical element of Hodgkins’ wartime painting. Maurice Sochachewsky and Hermann Brück are less well-known figures, their works building a wider understanding of modernist approaches to landscape.

The earliest works in Panorama are by Paul Signac and Frances Hodgkins that depict ports and harbours across Europe. Hodgkins’ Red sails (1906) is characteristic of her early watercolour painting, as she was travelling regularly between Aotearoa New Zealand and Europe. Moving forward three decades, Ibiza Harbour (c.1933) shows the radical change in Hodgkins’ work. Prints by Nicholas de Staël and Michael Ayrton extend upon this abstracted view of the Mediterranean, while Patrick Hayman takes viewers to England in Cornish coast (1959).

Finally, Panorama considers some of Hodgkins’ celebrated portraits, interiors, and still-life paintings in the context of other artists including works by David Jones, Duncan Grant, and Vanessa Bell. Grant and Bell, who were core members of the Bloomsbury Group, shared overlapping social connections with Hodgkins and the artists were aware of one another’s careers. A significant relationship came via John Piper and his wife Myfanwy Evans, who were both strong supporters of Hodgkins as well as having links to many Bloomsbury Group artists.