Anna Hotchkis

Anna Mary Hotchkis (30 May 1885 – 14 October 1984) was a Scottish artist, writer and lecturer on art. She exhibited in London, Beijing, Hong Kong and at exhibitions in Scotland. Member of and exhibited with the Royal Scottish Academy 1915-1968.[1][2]

Early life

Hotchkis was born in Crookston House, Renfrewshire, Scotland (near Glasgow). She had three sisters, Margaret, Catherine and Isobel (1879–1947, also a painter), and six brothers, only one of whom, Richard, is known to have survived into adulthood.

Anna inherited a love of painting from her mother and wanted to be an artist from age 14.[3] Began formal training at the Glasgow School of Art at age 21, despite objections from parents who were worried about her delicate health. Family moved to Edinburgh in 1907, and Anna enrolled at the Edinburgh College of Art to study under Robert Burns for three years. She completed her studies there but left without taking a diploma. Around this time, three of the sisters Anna, Margaret and Isobel, went to Munich to study art under Hans Lasker.

At the suggestion of her Edinburgh teacher, Anna set up a studio in the small town of Kirkcudbright, initially rented then bought from Jessie M King, an acquaintance of her teacher. She kept the studio from 1915 until her death in 1984.

First encounter with China

In 1922 Anna travelled to China via the US, Japan and Korea to visit her sister Catherine in Mukden (now Shenyang), where she had been since 1915 setting up and running a girls’ school for the YWCA. After Mukden, Anna spent three months in Shanghai, where she held an exhibition of her work. While painting child labourers at a cotton factory there she caught a severe infection, which caused her to return to Mukden and then move to Peking for treatment. She decided to stay in Peking to take up an offer to fill in for the art teacher at Yenching University.

Anna taught at Yenching for a year and then returned to Scotland in 1924, travelling on the Trans-Siberian Express to Moscow, where she stayed with the Quaker mission, then home to London via Berlin. She brought back with her over 70 pictures which she exhibited in the Brook Street Gallery in London.[4] She returned to China in 1926, lodging with a Chinese family in Peking, where she remained until the Japanese invasion of China in 1937.

Travels in China

In July 1924, while in convalescence at her sister's holiday house at the seaside resort of Beidaihe, she had first met the American painter Mary Mullikin who, hearing there was a fellow artist in town, rode over on a donkey to introduce herself.[5] Despite Anna living in Peking and Mary in Tianjin, the two became good friends and after Anna’s return to China travelled extensively together, writing several books and articles about their travels there.

Their first trip together was to Japan and Korea in 1927. In 1929 Anna visited her sisters in the UK, travelling via Japan and Los Angeles. She returned to China the following year, and in September 1931 she and Mary made their first trip to the Yungang caves near the city of Datong in northern Shanxi province. They returned there the following June, having conceived the idea of publishing a book about the cave sculptures of Yungang, to be illustrated with their own paintings and drawings. They returned from Yungang the long way round, via Hangzhou and the sacred island of Putuoshan, one of the Four Great Mountains of Buddhism in China.

In an attempt to find an English publisher for their intended book Anna again visited the UK later in 1932, but she returned empty-handed. While in London she held another exhibition in the Brook Street Galleries, this time including paintings of the Yungang caves by Mary Mullikin as well as her own. A notice in The Times was favourable: "As much for their enterprise and courage as for their judgement and talent are these ladies to be praised. Ignoring the usual interests of the globe-trotter, they have concentrated on artistic and archeological values peculiar to the places visited, which few have the opportunity to see."[6] Eventually they found a publisher for the book in Peking, Henri Vetch, whose Librairie francaise specialised in books in English and French on Chinese themes. Having agreed to publish their first book, Vetch now suggested they travel around China to all the most sacred Buddhist and Taoist mountains for another book. Meanwhile, a planned trip to Kaifeng and Luoyang in 1934 had to be cancelled because of fighting between warlords in the area, but in October 1934 the two artists managed to spend a week painting on Mount Tai in Shandong province, the pre-eminent sacred peak of the Taoists and one of the mountains Vetch suggested. This was apparently Anna’s first trip there although Mary had been several times already.

In 1935 Anna moved into a house in Xie He Hutong in the eastern district of Peking. The house had been rented since 1931 by Laurence Sickman, an American later to become the Director of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, and his mother. When Sickman returned to the US in 1935, his mother wished to stay in Peking and invited Anna to share the beautifully furnished traditional courtyard house.[7] In the spring of 1935 Mary came to Peking to stay with Anna and celebrate the publication by Vetch of their book on the Yungang caves. On 27 August they set out from Peking on the journey first suggested by Vetch, a self-styled “pilgrimage” to the sacred mountains. This they completed in two formidable journeys, over two months in the autumn of 1935 (to northern Heng Shan, Wutai Shan and Hua Shan) and four months in the spring and summer of 1936 (to Song Shan, Emei Shan, southern Heng Shan and Jiu Hua Shan). On the steep slopes of Hua Shan in Shanxi province, the fifty-year-old Anna suffered heart strain, but after resting in Beijing through the winter of 1935-36 was fit to continue.

Return to Scotland

In July 1937 the Japanese Army, which had occupied the northern Chinese province of Manchuria since 1932, invaded the rest of China, taking Peking in August. Anna reluctantly decided to leave China, returning by ship via Japan, then Hong Kong, Sri Lanka, India and Iraq to Greece. Another ship took her via Constantinople to Venice, where she caught a night train to Paris, and then back to London, where she arrived in April 1938, some five months after leaving Peking.

Anna settled back in her studio in Kirkcudbright in Scotland. In 1940 she visited friends in Paris, where characteristically she caught one of the last boats from France to England during the German invasion.[8] Back in Scotland during the war, she worked as a supervisor in a cordite factory in Dalbeattie for 10 months, before being forced to retire from the war effort due to ill health and return to Kirkcudbright to paint.[9] After the war she travelled extensively in Europe and North America, and made two trips to Hong Kong where Henri Vetch had re-established his publishing business. Her and Mary’s second book, The Nine Sacred Mountains of China, was finally published there in December 1973, 37 years after the pilgrimage it documented.

Active and exhibiting almost until the end,[10] Anna died peacefully in Kirkcudbright in 1985, in her 100th year. She never married or had children.

Publications

(with Mary Mullikin):

Further reading

A brief and in some respects inaccurate biography can be found in Peter McEwan, Dictionary of Scottish Art and Architecture (1995).

References

  1. ↑ Charles Baile de la Perriere, ed., The Royal Scottish academy exhibitors 1826-1990 : a dictionary of artists and their work in the annual exhibitions of the Royal Scottish Academy, 1991, entry under Hotchkis, Miss Anna Mary
  2. ↑ Joanna Soden, "Anna Mary Hotchkis," in Elizabeth Ewan, Sue Innes, and Sian Reynolds, eds., The Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women (Edinburgh University Press 2007): 171.
  3. ↑ Interview in Glasgow Herald, 9 September 1982
  4. ↑ The Evening News, Glasgow, 24 April 1925
  5. ↑ Recalled by AH in an interview in the Glasgow Herald, 10 March 1973
  6. ↑ The Times of London, 15 April 1933
  7. ↑ Described in Harold Acton, Memoirs of an aesthete, London 1948, 323-4.
  8. ↑ Glasgow Herald 9 September 1982
  9. ↑ Glasgow Herald, 10 March 1973
  10. ↑ Her last exhibition seems to have been for the Travelling Art Gallery, based in Edinburgh, at the age of 95: Galloway News, 12 February 1981