Hodgkin was an English painter, printmaker and collector. His preference was for emotionally charged figurative groupings in which the figures appeared embedded in the matrix of the picture. The often manic humour helped place Hodgkin in the climate of Pop art, although he was not directly associated with the movement. Hodgkin was always concerned to make the picture an object, and from 1970 he worked not on canvas but on assertive wooden supports, such as drawing boards or door frames.

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Hodgkin's paintings were generally small in scale, consciously conceived within the tradition of European easel painting. He painted extremely slowly, sometimes taking up to four years or more on a single work. During this process the clarity of the original imagery was often obscured, and the spectator was invited to decipher the finished image as a kind of riddle.