Notes

The son of a landscape artist, Ivon Hitchens was trained at London’s Royal Academy and early on influenced by critic and painter Roger Fry. It was only in the 1930s that Hitchens began to synthesise his admiration for Paul Cézanne into a noteworthy personal practice. A founder member of the Seven and Five Club in Hampstead, an English group of artists committed to a home-grown version of modernist abstraction, he is best known for his energetic landscapes of West Sussex. Hitchens began painting in this region in the late 1930s. The bombing of his London studio in 1940 prompted Hitchens to relocate to Lavington Common near Petworth in Sussex, where he settled permanently. This lot is typical of his earlier representational landscapes using more sober colours. The dramatic horizontal form, sweeping brushwork and ability to render the sensation of light are hallmarks of his esteemed landscape practice. - Sean O’Toole

Provenance

Howard Bliss.

Dr A Hunter, 1950.

Mr and Mrs Harrison.

The Labia Collection.

Exhibited

The Mayor Gallery, London, 1925.
Art Exhibitions Bureau.
Waddington Galleries, London.
South African National Gallery, Cape Town, 1956.
South African National Gallery, Cape Town, Friends of South African National Gallery, Labia Private Collection exhibition, catalogue number 37.