Between 1928 and 1931, Frances Hodgkins' painting entered a particularly inventive and productive phase referred to by the London dealer Arthur Howell as her 'Four Vital Years'. The Farmer's Daughter belongs to this period and can be dated securely to 1929 - 30. There are, in fact, two versions of this subject both showing the same sitter and painted about the same time when Hodgkins was living at her friend and patron Geoffrey Gorer's country cottage called 'The Croft' at Bradford-on-Tone, Somerset. It was one of many portraits of her friends and acquaintances made at the time. The other version was owned by the art collector and dealer Lucy Wertheim who bought several portraits of young women by Hodgkins including The Sisters and The Bridesmaids, both now in the Auckland Art Gallery. The sitter for The Farmer's Daughter has been identified as Annie Coggan who lived on a nearby farm and had the task of keeping an eye on the cottage when Gorer and his wife were absent. Annie Coggan was a regular visitor to the cottage along with her daughters Nancy and Joan who feature in the oil of the same period called Village Girls. Annie Coggan became a friend who supplied food and supplies for Hodgkins when she stayed at 'The Croft' and was described by her as having 'the billionaire's standard of provisioning'. Hodgkins has painted Annie as a fresh-faced country woman set against a pastoral landscape of farm buildings, fields and trees. She wears a white dress and runs her hands through her hair which is loose and falls down round her shoulders. A prominent red rose adorns her dress and carries symbolic connotations of English beauty. Judging by a contemporary photograph of Annie, Hodgkins did not much bother about achieving a physical likeness; instead Annie appears as more youthful and ornamental than she does in the photo. Hodgkins sought a spontaneous and unsophisticated quality in the portrait perhaps reflecting the ideas of the Surrealist artists and theorists. In this painting and related portraits, she looked closely at the works of the Parisian artist Marie Laurencin (1885 -1956) then much admired for her pseudo-naive, charming and decorative images of women and girls. Laurencin emphasised the eyes, enlarging them and giving them the melting expressions of sweetness and sentiment echoed in Hodgkins. The exposed neck and decolletage continue the association with Laurencin which is translated into an English idiom where the rural setting and healthy lifestyle give wholesomeness as well as sensuality to the image. The way Hodgkins projects her sitter against the pastoral landscape recalls her still life subjects of the same period where the motifs are assembled in front of landscape elements. The paint application is similar to 'still life in a landscape' works like Berries and Laurel also painted at Gorer's cottage about 1930. Her portraits were usually not commissions but records of friendships, as was the case with Rita Angus. In this instance, she gave the portrait to Annie Coggan who handed it down to her daughter Nancy.