Dinner at West Hill
- Artist: Howard Hodgkin
- Date: 1964–6
- Medium: Oil paint on canvas
- Dimensions: support: 1067 x 1270 mm
- Museum: Tate Britain
- Collection record: Tate Britain website
Listen to the free audio guide
About this artwork
This is “Dinner at West Hill” by Howard Hodgkin. The canvas, about 42 by 50 inches, was painted in 1964–66 and is an oil on canvas. It captures a very specific moment – a dinner party held on 15 March 1964 by the artist’s friends Bernard and Jeannie Cohen in a green‑and‑white dining room. Hodgkin tells us he had to “contend with a nervous and glittering evening” in that room, full of small portraits of the Cohens on the walls.
You’ll notice a stark white line across the scene. Hodgkin explained that it’s the edge of the table, but it also slices the picture in two, reminding us that the whole surface is flat – the illusion of depth is deliberately denied. The marks on the canvas echo forms from Bernard Cohen’s own paintings, so the picture feels both familiar and abstract. It’s one of Hodgkin’s most complex and delicately balanced works, a careful negotiation of people, objects, and space in a single, unified plane. The painting was presented by Eliot Hodgkin in 1969 and has since moved through a number of exhibitions, but its focus remains that single, vivid evening at West Hill.
See it in person
Dinner at West Hill is in the collection of Tate Britain on Millbank, London — free to enter. Point your phone at any artwork there and audioguide.london plays a free audio guide in six languages — no app download needed.
