Where Frances & Isabel excelled, as could have been predicted, was in the visual arts. Isabel in particlular seemed to have inherited her father's talent. In her early teens she was already painting landscapes in emulation of his own and soon become his companion not only at sessions of the Art Club but in sketching expeditions at the lakes and mountains of Central Otago. She also displayed her skills in two other genres, small the flower painting and the still life. Such was her progress that in 1884, before her seventeenth birthday, she was elected a working member of the Otago Arts Society. The following year she sold her first picture, Clematis, painted when she was just 12 years old, and soon her watercolours were hanging with her father's on the wall of the genteel Dunedin drawing rooms. Reference: p. 10 Portrait of Frances Hodgkins, E H McCormick, Auckland University press, 1981, 1982, 1990