Eliot Hodgkin (19 June 1905 – 30 May 1987) was an English painter, best known for his highly detailed still lifes executed either in tempera or oil.
By the middle of the 1930s Hodgkin had established himself as a painter of still lifes, landscapes and murals, exhibiting regularly at the Royal Academy. His first one-man exhibition was in London at Picture Hire Ltd. in 1936. Shortly afterwards he began working in egg tempera.
"In so far as I have any conscious purpose, it is to show the beauty of natural objects which are normally thought uninteresting or even unattractive: such things as Brussels sprouts, turnips, onions, pebbles and flints, bulbs, dead leaves, bleached vertebrae, an old boot cast up by the tide. People sometimes tell me that they had never really ‘seen’ something before I painted it, and I should like to believe this... For myself, if I must put it into words, I try to look at quite simple things as though I were seeing them for the first time and as though no one had ever painted them before.""I like to show the beauty of things that no one looks at twice."
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