Small Rain is a glutinous, pulchritudinous painting from a mature phase of Howard Hodgkin’s career, begun around 1980, in which he defined a new idiom by painting the frame of his paintings. It was painted using a narrow palette of richly saturated colours, likely manufactured by the colour-maker Michael Harding. The frame is predominantly painted at the surface in earth green. Bright green shows through in places beneath the darker surface, over which terre verte was scumbled around some of the edges. On the central panel within the painted frame, wide brushstrokes of sunshine yellow are surrounded and edged with a lighter hue of terre verte, which was applied wet-on-wet. Underlying colours and brush textures are partially visible at the surface, and these indicate earlier phases in the painting’s development. Although the paint was applied mostly in smooth, extended strokes of a wide brush, the interstices of the frame’s mouldings are somewhat gummed with accretions of coagulated paint. Small Rain creates a pictorial effect of enclosed space, partially revealed by unfolding layers of literal and representational framing. The title and subject-matter of the painting are characteristically veiled, but an erotic subtext is implied by the title Small Rain, which is a quotation from a Middle English poem called Westron Wynde.

In the years since Hodgkin’s death, it has become increasingly apparent that homosexual desire was a recurring undercurrent in his work. He claimed that his paintings were evocations of a specific memory or emotional scenario: ‘the problem is making the picture stand up by itself, because the memory has to be translated into a thing, an object’. He preferred not to reveal the content of these memories; to do so would have compromised the integrity of painting and reduced it to mere illustration. Yet the clues provided by his titles are sometimes revelatory. The phrase ‘small rain’ was used in a short Middle English poem:

Westron wynde when wyll thow blow?
the smalle rayne downe can Rayne.
Cryst, yf my love were in my Armys
And I yn my bed Agayne!

This short lyric evokes the speaker’s longing to be in bed with their lover. The mood is one of gentle regret. There is tension between the rain-swept present and the warmth and intimacy of the recollection. As the poet and English scholar Charles Frey interpreted, ‘the nostalgic ending presents an almost-despairing emphasis upon gaps between past comfort and present pain.’ As Frey wrote in an article of 1976, the phrase ‘small rain’ is ambiguous and liable to be interpreted in different ways: ‘thin, biting’ or ‘fine, gentle’. The smoothly applied brushwork and translucency of Hodgkin’s painting may imply that he favoured the latter reading.

The longing and nostalgia of Westron Wynde were essential ingredients in many of Hodgkin’s paintings. The studio-based activity of painting involved an act of remembrance, recalling necessarily distant experiences, and the translation of these into the present, visually immediate artwork. In the context of Hodgkin’s painting Small Rain, the title serves the dual function of a synecdoche—evoking the broader context of the poem it is quoted from—and a literal suggestion of weather and atmospherics.

Hodgkin was temperamentally and genealogically interested in the weather. He was distantly related to Luke Howard (1772–1864), whose book about clouds established an enduring system for their classification. For the two-hundredth anniversary of John Constable’s birth in 1976, Hodgkin made a lithographic print entitled For Luke Howard. In the nineteen-eighties, he began to make more paintings with titular references to weather, atmosphere and meteorological events. Monsoon in Bombay (1975–77) [Price 2006, no. 137] marked the advent of rain in his paintings.

The development of his mature style—distinguished by framing devices, translucency, iconic symbols (the palm, the spot), extended applications of liquid paint—complemented his growing interest in weather and atmosphere. The fluidity, translucency and layered compositions of his emerging mature style opened a new avenue to explore landscape atmospherics. By contrast, his earlier preference for opaque, hard-edged forms was far less compatible with the evocation of clouds, rains, mists, etc.

From 1985 or so, weather events became a more common subject in his work and signalled a widening of Hodgkin’s interest in atmospherics, which had previously been concerned largely with the luscious sunsets and tropical climate of India. Rain in Venice (1983–85) [Price 2006, no. 199], Venice Rain (1984–87) [Price 2006, no. 218] and Rain (1984–89) [Price 2006, no. 236] were early examples of his interest in European climates. Although the exploration of landscape as a pictorial phenomenon was not a new departure, it was a shift of emphasis. Wholly or partially enclosed interiors—of restaurants, bedrooms, dining rooms—remained important but were no longer so predominant in his work as they were previously.

Small Rain can be categorised with other paintings by Hodgkin, completed from the mid-eighties onwards, which address weather and atmospheric conditions. His weather titles all permit a degree of interpretation. Each evokes an atmosphere, rather than serving a merely descriptive function. Storm and After the Storm, for instance, may invoke connotations of emotional turbulence. Red Sky in the Morning and Red Sky at Night are borrowed from the English idiom, ‘red sky at night shepherd’s delight, red sky in the morning shepherd’s warning’. While snow and sky were recurrent topics, none occurs more frequently than rain:

• Small Rain (1990) [Price 2006, no. 247]
• The Heat of the Day (1995–96) [Price 2006, no. 292]
• Alpine Snow (1997) [Price 2006, no. 304]
• Heat (1987–97) [Price 2006, no. 312]
• Storm (1996–97) [Price 2006, no. 316]
• After the Storm (2000) [Price 2006, no. 347]
• Dirty Weather (2001) [Price 2006, no. 367]
• Stormy Weather (first version) (1993–96) [Price 2006, no. 375]
• Stormy Weather (final version) (1993–2001) [Price 2006, no. 375a]
• Fog (2002) [Price 2006, no. 382]
• Spring Rain (2000–02) [Price 2006, no. 393]
• Thunder (1999–2002) [Price 2006, no. 394]
• Blue Sky (2001–03) [Price 2006, no. 398]
• The Heat of the Day (2003) [Price 2006, no. 405]
• Heat (2003–04)
• A Rainbow (2003–04) [Price 2006, no. 426]
• Rain on the Pane (2009)
• Yellow Sky (2009–10)
• Snow Cloud (2009–10)
• Snowfall (2010)
• Rain (2011)
• Red Sky at Night (2001–11)
• Weather (2009–12)
• Wet Evening (2009–12)
• Dark Cloud (2012)
• Pink Sky (2005–13)
• Summer Rain (2002–13)
• The Rains Came (2014)
• Blue Rain (2014–15)
• Low Cloud (2015)
• Indian Rain (2015)
• Clouds (2015)
• Thundercloud (2015–16)
• Darkness at Noon (2015–16)
• Red Sky in the Morning (2016)

Hodgkin made two paintings called Small Rain, and there are many instances in his oeuvre of repeating themes and reiterating a painting with revisions. The other was painted in 1990. Both works take their title from the same poetic source, but they are not alike and were apparently not intended as pendants. This contrast with other weather paintings, such as Stormy Weather (first version) and Stormy Weather (final version), which expressly explored the same pictorial theme with variations of palette and composition.

Small Rain was purchased by Caroline Conran shortly after her divorce from the designer Terence Conran. They had been painted by Hodgkin as a married couple in a painting of 1978–81, Mr and Mrs Terence Conran [Price 2006, no. 164].