At the National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery, I was both excited and overwhelmed by the sheer volume of portraits, paintings, drawings and more that filled the galleries. I wanted more than anything to linger at each and every item on display, read the entire plaque, and stare at it until it lost all definition, but I only had so much time I could spend at the galleries. Out of the vast assortment of pieces to which I bore witness—though only a fraction of a fraction of all the pieces demanding to be witnessed—I chose the following painting about which to write:
This sitter and main focus of the painting above is chemist Dr. Dorothy Hodgkin (1910 – 1994). She was the first British woman to win the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1964 for defining the structures of penicillin, Vitamin B12, and insulin using x-ray crystallography. The Gallery commissioned British artist Maggi Hambling to paint Dorothy in 1985.
Dorothy is clearly an intelligent, well-respected, and influential figure who does not have the time to sit and pose for a boring portrait. Maggi honors Dorothy’s character by painting Dorothy in her actual study, while she’s working, with a model of the penicillin structure in the bottom left corner. In the back, we can see shelves crammed full of books, binders, and folders, presumably for her thesis and teaching. Dorothy’s desk is scattered with papers, instruments, and other items she uses for her work. At her desk, we can see that Dorothy has four blurry hands working double-time. The plaque for this painting said the “two pairs of hands convey energy and activity,” but it also “refers to the subject’s acute arthritis.” All of these small details come together into a shrine to immortalize Dorothy Hodgkin’s life and her achievements as she wished them to be remembered.
Maggi Hambling is iconic and, I believe, the perfect choice for this painting. One of her other, slightly more famous paintings is of Mary Wollstonecraft, the “foremother of feminism”. Also, when I looked Maggi up, the first picture was of her puffing smoke out of her nose while posing in front of a scene of monochrome, chaotic paintings:
One strong, successful woman painting another strong, successful woman is the recipe for a monumental painting!
– Hadley ❤
Theatre in London U of A 