April Haze, No. 3 was created during one of Hitchens’ most celebrated periods, between representing Britain at the 1956 Venice Biennale alongside Lynn Chadwick and receiving his CBE in 1958. Trees and cottages emerge from a panoramic sweep that appears, at first glance, almost abstract, an effect characteristic of Hitchens’ mature work. He kept the painting in his studio for over a decade before Kenneth acquired it directly from Hitchens in the early 1970s.

The number in its title points to Hitchens’ practice of returning to a subject in successive paintings. A motif was rarely exhausted by a single interpretation: each version allowed Hitchens to reconsider the balance of shapes, the movement across the canvas and the effect of one colour upon another. Here a substantial yellow form rises near the centre, dividing passages of cool blue and grey from smaller marks of green and ochre. Soft pinks and violets seem to hover over the scene. The trees and cottages move in and out of recognition, much as forms might appear through the changing light of an April haze.