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Talk:Eliot Hodgkin

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COI, Notability, and Neutrality tags

[edit]

I have removed the notability tag. This artist has the three works in the permanent collection of the Tate Gallery, one in the Jerwood Collection, one in the Imperial War Museum, and one in the Berger Collection of the Denver Art Museum, and numerous others in private collections. In addition to the works used as references, he also has entries in several publications, especially those on flower paintings [1]. I see no evidence of a lack of neutral point of view. Can someone please point to where this occurs? The introductory paragraph is quite factual per this source:

A painter and writer, Eliot Hodgkin chose not to enter the family engineering business but to become an artist. He studied at the Royal Academy Schools in London, later exhibiting there. In his forties he began to create the exquisitely painted still lifes, painted in tempera, for which he is best known. Some recall the delicate fruit and flower paintings in sixteenth-century Flemish manuscripts. Others, such as this work, display the compositional clarity of still lifes by his contemporary Giorgio Morandi. (Catalog of the Berger Collection)

Finally, unless the COI of an article's main author/creator is evidenced in an article which is not neutrally worded and poorly referenced, the tag should be removed and replaced with a connected contributor template on this page. I'm going to wait 24 hours for a reply/discussion here and if none is forthcoming, I'm going to remove the COI and POV tags. Voceditenore (talk) 09:25, 13 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, Voceditenore, I expect you are right about notability. I was a little surprised by your edit summary and comment above, though: having an object in a museum does not in itself demonstrate notability – the store-rooms of many museums are filled to bursting with objects by wholly non-notable creators. But the artist descriptions on the Tate and Imperial War Museum pages and the entry in Chamot, Farr and Butlin certainly seem enough to show that he is notable. Yes, I imagine it was something like "… most of his finest works …" that struck me as less than neutral. I don't think there's any doubt about the COI; whether or not the article should be tagged for it is a different question … Justlettersandnumbers (talk) 11:28, 13 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Hi Justlettersandnumbers. The documentation for the use of the Template:COI states quite clearly:
Do not use this tag unless there are significant or substantial problems with the article's neutrality as a result of the contributor's involvement. Like the other {{POV}} tags, this tag is not meant to be a badge of shame or to "warn the reader" about the identities of the editors. [original bolding].
Hence the inappropriateness of the tag in this case. Apart from the word "finest", which arguably is quite accurate, there were no other neutrality problems with the article, let alone "significant or substantial" ones. To be on the safe side, I've rephrased the sentence in the lede to "Although he began with oil painting, most of his best known works were highly detailed still lifes executed in tempera." and have removed the tags. Voceditenore (talk) 12:20, 13 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Incidentally, there is an article on Hodgkin in the French Wikipedia which pre-dates this one by two years and was created by an editor there (unconnected to the artist) who specialises in art history articles and is himself a published art historian. Voceditenore (talk) 12:37, 13 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]