Among the brilliant flashes of colour that animate Poppies and a Garden Chair, the scarlet heads of the poppies immediately command attention. Scattered across the composition rather than contained within a conventional still life, they emerge from a garden transformed into an arrangement of colour, movement and space. Although Hitchens is celebrated above all as a landscape painter, flowers remained an important subject throughout his career, offering many of the same possibilities for expressive handling, inventive colour and rhythmic structure that he explored in the landscape.

In this exquisite painting, the distinction between still life and landscape is deliberately blurred. The poppies punctuate sweeping passages of green, blue, violet, grey and earthy brown, while the garden chair is similarly absorbed into Hitchens’ painterly vocabulary. Its curving structure emerges and disappears among the surrounding vegetation, so that object and landscape become inseparable. Rather than describing individual elements precisely, Hitchens allows colour and gesture to convey the experience of looking: forms are glimpsed, interrupted and rediscovered as the eye travels across the canvas. The elongated format heightens this sense of movement. Brilliant notes of vermilion lead the eye rhythmically from one side of the composition to the other, while the chair provides a loose underlying structure around which the freer passages of paint appear to circulate.

For Kenneth Webb, Poppies and a Garden Chair acquired a significance extending far beyond its place within his collection. The painting had a profound influence on Webb’s own subsequent paintings of poppies, creating a particularly compelling dialogue between the work of the two artists. Webb did not simply live with and admire Hitchens’ painting; its vivid treatment of the flower became absorbed into his own artistic imagination and found renewed expression within his own work.