Palms
One of Howard Hodgkin’s more figurative bodies of work, Palms is a series of six prints produced between 1986 and 1990. Though less abstract, they retain the rich sensory quality of Hodgkin’s work: with tropical warmth captured in colour, graceful motion expressed in sweeping strokes and dappled light evoked through stippling.
Howard Hodgkin Palms For sale
Palms Value (5 Years)
With £47829 in the past 12 months, Howard Hodgkin's Palms series is one of the most actively traded in the market. Prices have varied significantly – from £800 to £19791 – driven by fluctuations in factors like condition, provenance, and market timing. Over the past 12 months, the average selling price was £5978, with an average annual growth rate of 1.41% across the series.
Palms Market value
Auction Results
| Artwork | Auction Date | Auction House | Return to Seller | Hammer Price | Buyer Paid |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 Flowering Palm Howard Hodgkin Signed Print | 2 Jul 2025 | Forum Auctions London | £7,225 | £8,500 | £10,500 |
 Palm And Window Howard Hodgkin Signed Print | 2 Jul 2025 | Forum Auctions London | £7,225 | £8,500 | £10,500 |
 Street Palm Howard Hodgkin Signed Print | 2 Jul 2025 | Forum Auctions London | £4,250 | £5,000 | £6,500 |
 Red Palm Howard Hodgkin Signed Print | 1 Apr 2025 | Bonhams New York | £3,400 | £4,000 | £5,000 |
 Night Palm Howard Hodgkin Signed Print | 18 Sept 2024 | Sotheby's Online | £4,675 | £5,500 | £7,000 |
 Black Palm Howard Hodgkin Signed Print | 23 Apr 2021 | Sotheby's New York | £3,740 | £4,400 | £6,000 |
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Meaning & Analysis
Sir Howard Hodgkin was one of the leading figures of Post-War British art. The artist never acknowledged any affiliation to canonical art movements, preferring instead to work on the edge of styles and drawing from a variety of sources such as Fauvism, Impressionism, Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism. However, predominating his paintings and prints is the dominance of large abstract gestural brushstrokes that verge close to the works of Abstract Expressionist painters. Hodgkin famously declared to be drawn to abstraction and colour as means to convey emotional states. He claimed: “I am a representational painter, but not a painter of appearances. I paint representational pictures of emotional situations.” Sometimes, however, representation did take hold in the artist’s production, as in the case of the series of works Palms, which feature one of Hodgkin’s favourite representational motifs - the palm tree.
Palms is a series of six prints produced between 1986 and 1990. At this time Hodgkin was enjoying international notoriety and fame and was experimenting with increasingly large-scale formats. Importantly, the prints were produced after Hodgkin had been introduced by master printer Jack Shireff to carborundum printing. This technique, which characterised all of Hodgkin’s prints, allowed the artist to increase the gestural and expressive quality of the prints, adding emotional intensity through texture and embossings. In fact, the artist claimed he had been inspired to depict palms because of how easily they lent themselves to brash painterly immediacy. Additionally, as typical of Hodgkin’s printmaking practice, the prints exhibit a mixture of printed and hand-applied colours, which recur in many of his later series like As Time Goes By.
