An Artist's Collection: Ivon Hitchens
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Overview
Ivon Hitchens was one of the most original British painters of the twentieth century. His landscapes are immediately recognisable for their long horizontal canvases, assured brushwork and extraordinary command of colour. Yet their enduring appeal lies in something less easily defined: the sense that a familiar place can be discovered anew each time we look at it.
An Artist’s Collection: Ivon Hitchens brings together seven paintings held in a private collection since the late 1970s. Painted between 1942 and 1978, they trace Hitchens’ career from his early wartime landscapes in Sussex to the brilliant colour and greater freedom of his late work. Presented together exclusively at House 50, Burlington Arcade, after nearly fifty years in private hands, this exceptional collection offers a rare opportunity to consider the breadth of Hitchens’ oeuvre, and to make a part of this remarkable history one’s own.
The collection’s particular significance lies in the discerning eye of its owner, the landscape artist Kenneth Webb, whom Gladwell & Patterson have had the honour of representing for many decades. Kenneth had admired Hitchens’ work since his student years, and its influence became particularly evident in his paintings of the mid-1970s. The two first met at Hitchens’ eightieth birthday party in 1973, forming a firm friendship sustained by regular meetings and a shared enthusiasm for the possibilities of painting. Their artistic exchange extended beyond admiration: Kenneth introduced Hitchens to the experimental possibilities of acrylic paints, adding a further dimension to the creative bond that gives this collection its distinctive character.
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Born in London in 1893, Ivon Hitchens studied at St John’s Wood Art School and the Royal Academy Schools. He became part of the progressive artistic circle in Hampstead that included Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, and was closely associated with the Seven and Five Society. His commitment to experiment was established early, even as the landscape remained a constant source of inspiration.
The decisive change in Hitchens’ life came in 1940. Following bomb damage to his London studio, he moved with his wife Mollie and their young son John to woodland at Lavington Common, near Petworth in West Sussex. They first lived in a caravan; a studio and house followed on the site they named Greenleaves. For almost four decades, its six acres of wooded garden, together with the surrounding heathland and countryside, formed the centre of Hitchens’ working life. He painted outdoors in all seasons, returning to places he knew intimately as light, weather and growth altered their appearance.
The seven works in this exhibition share Hitchens’ characteristic horizontal format. He used its length to encourage the eye to travel across a painting, encountering one relationship of colour and form after another. A branch might direct that movement; an area of unpainted canvas could give neighbouring colours greater force. Hitchens sometimes described the experience of looking at his pictures in musical terms, asking viewers to attend to the rhythms and intervals within a composition. The landscape was always present, but its forms offered him the means to create something beyond a record of a particular view.
Hitchens represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1956 and was appointed CBE in 1958. Recognition continued throughout his later years, when his handling of paint became increasingly free and his colour more adventurous. Prolific to the end of his life, he found continually renewed possibilities in the landscape around Greenleaves. The freshness of those paintings, the immediacy of their marks and the vitality of their colour, speaks to collectors today as powerfully as it did to those who first encountered them in his lifetime.
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Gladwell & Patterson is grateful for the opportunity to bring these seven paintings together for this exhibition at House 50, Burlington Arcade after fifty years in private hands. Their shared history offers a distinctive perspective on Hitchens’ career and on the friendship between two prolific artists. The exhibition is on view from 12 - 25 October 2026.
For further information, please contact the gallery at emily@gladwellpatterson.com or on +44 (0) 207 584 5512.
