La Vie en Rose is a title of a 1942 song with lyrics by Edith Piaf and music by Louiguy. It was later translated into English by Mack David and recorded by Louis Armstrong in 1950.

With broad swathes of orange and red that sweep across a painterly field contained by a thick border of chestnut brown, La Vie en Rose is characteristic of Howard Hodgkin’s output in the late 1990s, during which he abandoned all representational form. The title of the present work is taken from Edith Piaf’s signature song of the same name. Painted on a wood panel, which Hodgkin had used since 1960, the work centres around a glowing sunset scene.

In his signature style, Hodgkin has extended the painting directly onto its frame, which he saw as essential to the painting’s content as any chromatic choice. With support, surround and paint forged into a unified whole, the paintings - and indeed the memories and sentiments that fuel them – are enshrined as autonomous, self-sufficient presences. ‘The more evanescent the emotion I want to convey’, Hodgkin said, ‘the thicker the panel, the heavier the framing, the more elaborate the border, so that this delicate thing will remain protected and intact’ (H. Hodgkin, quoted in P. Kinmouth, ‘Howard Hodgkin’, Vogue, June 1984). While buffering the contained feeling against the outside world, the frames – like stage curtains, or the doorway to a room – also serve a focal and compositional purpose, inviting the viewer into an intimate interior realm.

Hodgkin’s paintings are nearly always inspired by a memory, which he has then distilled into a single image built up over many years; indeed, the three-year gestation period of La Vie en Rose reflects the artist’s introspective, thoughtful working process. Although their titles may contain allusions to real places or people, very little in Hodgkin’s paintings is ever explicit: ‘I am a representational painter, but not a painter of appearances,’ he remarked. ‘I paint representational pictures of emotional situations’ (H. Hodgkin, quoted in M. Price, Howard Hodgkin: The Complete Paintings Catalogue Raisonné, Fort Worth, 2006, p. 14). Instead, the viewer is left with an overwhelming and potent sensation of a remembered feeling, fortified and solidified through the unification of support and image. In the case of La Vie en Rose, Hodgkin has captured a waning sun, the pleasant warmth of the day fading into dark.