Notes: Hodgkin painted Memoirs at the age of seventeen, and it imitates the principal preoccupations of his mature work. It depicts the artist listening to a family friend, nicknamed Aunt Bette, who is lying on a couch. The scene is her home in Long Island, where Hodgkin lived as a war-time evacuee, a place that he revisited in summer 1947. The artist has said of this painting, ‘It took me years to get back to the intensity of that picture. But I wanted to get there from another direction. I wanted to use paint as a substance’ (quoted in Timothy Hyman, ‘Howard Hodgkin: Making a Riddle Out of the Solution’, in Howard Hodgkin, New York: M. Knoedler & Co., 1990, p.8). See also Drawing for Memoirs.