Metaphor and the self-portrait: Frances Hodgkins's 'Self-portrait, still life' and 'Still life, self-portrait'

This article explores strategies of metaphor in relation to self-representation in two paintings by Frances Hodgkins, a major contributor to British Modernism in the 1930s and 1940s. Iconographically linked, the two works present a variety of objects which speak of notions of the 'self.' Shoes, scarves, flowers, a handbag and most-intriguingly-a blank mirror, are discussed with Hodgkins' sensuous painterliness in a kind of rebus arrangement. Discussion of Hodgkins' late work has usually focused on its connections with French School colour and style, with its symbolism ignored. I argue that this aspect of her work is particularly important in a reading of these works which so boldly, and so unusually, in context of British and wider European art of the time, use metaphor, rather than figuration, as their mode of identity construction. How one of these 'self-portraits' has been used and mis-used in various contexts is also investigated. I conclude by arguing that the works have more in common with contemporary literary culture, particularly with the aesthetic expressed in the novels of Virginia Woolf, than they do with contemporary visual culture.