1993

To celebrate a friend’s 60th birthday Hodgkin flies to Cairo in order to travel down the Nile. He agrees to see in dawn at the pyramids but refuses to climb one. See Mud on the Nile, 1993.

First show at the Anthony D’Offay galleries, London, also seen at Knoedler’s, New York. 24 paintings include After Degas, Keith and Kathy Sachs, Lovers, Venice Sunset, Snapshot and Fisherman’s Cove. Catalogue includes a conversation with the artist: “I am happy for people to talk about my pictures, but I wish devoutly that I was not expected to talk about them myself.”

The catalogue also includes his choice of extracts from Julian Barnes, Susan Sontag, Stendhal, Anita Brookner, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, G.K.Chesterton, Bruce Chatwin, Evelyn Waugh and Horace Walpole: “’tis pity we ever imported from the continent ideas of summer: nature gave us coal mines in lieu of it, and beautiful verdure, which is inconsistent with it, so that an observation I made 40 years ago, is most true, that this country exhibits the most beautiful landscapes in the world when they are framed and glazed, that is, when you look at them through the window.”