Today in History

1947 Death of Frances Hodgkins

One of New Zealand's most celebrated artists, Frances Hodgkins spent most of her life overseas. During a professional career that spanned 56 years, she earned a secure place among the British avant-garde of the 1930s and 1940s: the first New Zealand-born artist to achieve such stature. 

Born in Dunedin, Hodgkins left for Europe for the first time in 1901. Prior to her departure, she had focused on familiar and domestic settings, working mainly in portraiture − placing models in casual outdoor settings, surrounded by shrubbery or still life. In 1903 she became the first New Zealand artist to exhibit at the Royal Academy of Arts. By the 1920s she was well established in the British art scene. In 1929 she became associated with the Seven and Five Society, exhibiting alongside leading British avant-garde artists such as Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and Henry Moore. She began to combine landscape and still-life genres in her work. Urns and jugs filled with bouquets of flowers and patterned table cloths set in the foreground of a landscape became popular subjects. The late 1930s were a highly productive period for the increasingly confident Hodgkins. By the early 1940s she had held four major solo shows and had participated in approximately 30 group shows in Britain and abroad. She was selected as part of a small group of artists to represent Britain at the Biennale di Venezia in 1940. Frances Hodgkins died in a psychiatric hospital in Dorset in May 1947, after suffering from what proved to be a terminal illness. She was cremated at Weymouth. Her ashes were returned to New Zealand and placed in the family plot at Waikanae cemetery, near Wellington.

1936 NZ National Party founded

Following their crushing defeat by the Labour Party in the 1935 general election, the remnants of the United-Reform coalition met in Wellington on 13-14 May 1936 to establish a new conservative or ‘anti-socialist’ party.

The conference, held at the Dominion Farmers Institute Building, was attended by 11 members of the Dominion Executive of the National Political Federation (the body that had run the United-Reform government's campaign in 1935), 232 official delegates from around the country, representatives of women's and youth organisations and most of the surviving anti-Labour MPs. The party was named the New Zealand National Party, signalling a clean break with United and Reform, which had been discredited by their handling of the Depression. Adam Hamilton was elected as its first leader in October 1936.

The National Party grew quickly and by the time of its third annual conference in August 1938 it boasted more than 100,000 members. Even so, it would take a further 11 years for the party to win office for the first time. In the 1950s and 1960s National was one of the best-organised and largest mass-based democratic political parties in the world. It has also been the most successful party in New Zealand's political history, holding office (as of 2008) for a total of 38 years to Labour's 35 - and, even more impressively, all but 12 of the 50 years between 1949 and 1999.