Arrangement of Jugs is Frances Hodgkins’ only surviving print. It was commissioned by Contemporary Lithographs Ltd, a venture founded in 1936 by Robert Wellington and John Piper with the intention of providing a wide public with quality, reasonably priced, ‘original’ works. Printing was done at the Curwen Press, where the artists drew their designs and were given technical assistance by John Piper. Arrangement of Jugs was one of the fifteen prints in the second series, launched in March 1938, which included artists such as Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Edward Wadsworth, John Piper and Edward Ardizzone.

Arrangement of Jugs successfully adopts and extends Hodgkins’ mid-thirties approach to colour and form. The objects are simplified to outlines or silhouettes, with bright splashes of colour sometimes floating freely in space and effectively disregarding allegiance to particular objects. Some of the stone is left un-worked, the resulting light paper tones contributing towards a particularly buoyant image. Both Wellington and Piper were enthusiastic about Hodgkins’ lithograph, the former finding ‘the medium is used in quite a fresh way’, the latter seeing it as ‘the best in the series’. Hodgkins herself found the project ‘interesting and remunerative as a side line’. She was pleased when the British Museum purchased the series which included her lithograph and the complete series was also exhibited at the Tate Gallery in 1939.

Two watercolours in private collections are very close to Arrangement of Jugs and appear to be studies for it: the identically titled Arrangement of Jugs and Still Life. Hodgkins re-arranges similar objects, including the rectangular ‘modernist’ vase which also occurs as the receptacle for Mimosa (private collection, New Zealand) and appears in Wild Violets and Honesty (present location not known).

Few were signed and although there were to be around 300 impressions, only about half were completed due to the outbreak of World War II.

Employing the traditional printmaking medium of lithography and the conventional genre of still life, Hodgkins achieves innovation and modernism through her use of juxtaposition and collage. The still life jugs are integrated with subtle elements of architecture, seen in the reflections of the saffron jugs and the structured shapes of the blue vase and jug to the left of the composition.