Alexander Street belongs to the earliest chapter of Hodgkin's printmaking practice — a body of work that anticipated, in concentrated form, the emotional grammar for which he would spend a lifetime becoming celebrated.

Described by the critic Robert Hughes as "a colourist unsurpassed among living painters," Hodgkin never painted what he saw; he painted how he remembered things felt. Vivid green, red-brown, and burnt orange — drawn from three zinc plates and then heightened by hand in yellow watercolour and gouache — blend into a composition that is at once intimate and charged with atmosphere.

The hand-applied colour is not incidental embellishment; it is the artist's defining intention, and because each impression was coloured individually, no two examples are precisely alike.