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Overview
© reserved; collection National Portrait Gallery, London"Setting up canvas and box in all weathers, I seek first to unravel the essential meaning of my subject…and to understand my own psychological reactions to it" - Hitchens in P. Khoroche, Ivon Hitchens, 2007.
In his early career, Ivon Hitchens lived and worked from a studio in Hampstead, London, where he became part of a close circle of avant-garde artists including Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth. He exhibited with the London Group from the early 1920s and later showed with the Seven and Five Society, aligning himself with the development of modern British painting between the wars.
Following the destruction of his Hampstead studio during the Second World War, Hitchens relocated in 1940 to Petworth in West Sussex, where he established a studio in woodland at Lavington Common. This setting became central to his work, providing a sustained engagement with landscape that informed his practice for the remainder of his career. He remained based in Sussex for the rest of his life, working in close proximity to the surrounding countryside.
Hitchens’ paintings, encompassing landscape, still life and the figure, are closely tied to direct observation. He worked predominantly out of doors, developing compositions through repeated studies and reworkings. His approach to colour and open brushwork has often been compared to that of Pierre Bonnard, while his early tonal handling reflects an awareness of Constable’s oil sketches. He was elected a member of the Royal Academy in 1951.
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Works for sale
Ivon Hitchens British, 1893-1979
Lake, "O Hurry Where by Water Among Trees", 1968Oil on Canvas51.5 × 105.5 cms / 20¼ × 41½ inchesSigned 'Hitchens 68' (lower left)Price on ApplicationDescription
Painted in 1968, Lake, "O Hurry Where by Water Among Trees" takes its evocative title from the opening line of W. B. Yeats’s poem The Ragged Wood, first published in In the Seven Woods in 1904. Yeats conjures an enchanted landscape in which water, woodland and reflected images become inseparable - imagery that finds a remarkable visual counterpart in Hitchens’ own lifelong exploration of the Sussex landscape. Hitchens returned to the same poem as inspiration into the 1970s. His repeated invocation of Yeats suggests a particular affinity with a poem whose imagery of woodland, water and reflection so closely echoes the subjects that preoccupied Hitchens at Greenleaves, his secluded home near Petworth. Woodland pools, rivers and millponds offered an endlessly changing interplay of surface and reflection.
The painting's panoramic format is fundamental to this effect. Hitchens had long favoured an extended horizontal canvas as a means of resisting the single, static viewpoint of traditional landscape painting. Here, it allows the composition to unfold almost musically: passages of colour answer one another across the surface, while the sweep of the brush carries the eye from one end of the painting to the other. Water becomes less a discrete subject than a means of destabilising space itself — allowing earth, vegetation, sky and reflection to coexist within a single field of colour.
Provenance
Artist's Studio.
The Private Collection of an Artist, UK, acquired from the above in the 1970s.
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