Ivon Hitchens

The Artist
Alex. Reid & Lefevre Ltd, London, where acquired by Peter Findlay Gallery, New York, 1932
Grace Wilke, Wichita, Kansas, U.S.A and thence by descent to Streeter W. Funk

Original canvas. The canvas is sound. There is a very minor push in the upper left quadrant. There is an artist's pinhole in the lower right corner. There are a few small, isolated areas of fine and small lines of craquelure in places. There are two or three small spots of dirt in the lower right corner. Subject to the above the work is in very good overall condition. Inspection under ultraviolet light reveals no obvious signs of restoration or retouching. The work is held within an ornate composite frame with a velvet slip. Please telephone the department on +44 207 293 6424 if you have any questions.
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Autumn Flowers No. 1 is the epitomy of a 'Seven & Five Society' painting, redolent of the abiding aesthetic of this very British Modernist exhibiting group, which flourished from 1920 through until the beginning of the Second World War. As with many British groups or movements, artists came and went (our artists are rarely ones for dogma), from the original seven painters and five sculptors that gave the group its name, but the most notable arrival was perhaps Ben Nicholson, who from the mid-20s took control of the Society and began inviting some of the more avant-garde artists of the day to join. Yet, as Peter Khoroche notes, despite Nicholson's best efforts to make it more European in spirit, the ‘Seven & Five’ maintained a resolutely ‘English air.' ‘[It] is hard to pinpoint in words what this common denominator was, but in the most usual subjects, landscape and still life, there was a poetic naturalism in the painting, marked by a clarity and fresh delicacy of colour' (Peter Khoroche, Ivon Hitchens, Lund Humphries, Aldershot, 2007, pp.40-41).  And this, of course, is in itself a perfect summation of the one member of the ‘Seven and Five’ who exhibited there from beginning to end: Ivon Hitchens.

Furthermore, in Autumn Flowers No. 1 we can read almost all the varying (and competing) aspects of British Modernism in one picture, moving from left to right: from the tighter, Bloomsbury Impressionist rendering of the red and purple flowers, through to a more ‘naïve’ rendering of the flowers in the centre (showing perhaps the influence of Nicholson and Wood, with whom Hitchens had time spent at Bankshead, Ben and Winifred Nicholson's Modernist-Primitivist experiment in living); through to the roughly brushed and loosely constructed right-hand third that is pure Hitchens and which shows the beginnings of the visual style of the 1940s and '50s that was to make him such an inspiration to a younger generation of abstract painters, most notably Patrick Heron.

Hitchens had lived and worked in Hampstead since the early 1920s and so had witnessed this bohemian area of London transform into the centre of the British avant-garde, helped in no small part by the arrival in the area in the 1930s of key figures in both the home-grown and international Modern Movement: from Nicholson, Moore and Hepworth, through to Gropius, Moholy-Nagy and (by the end of the decade) Mondrian. Hitchens himself knew all about the latest ideas and theories coming out of Europe, but just as these ideas arrived, in person, on his doorstep, he made the decision (one quite radical given the surrounding intellectual milieu) not to entirely embrace abstraction. Instead he made a lifelong commitment to figuration, albeit a figuration in which abstract values of formal harmony and the independence of colour and mark-making from representational function are as important as the underlying motif.

The life of the studio was central to this and Hitchens’ light and airy space at Adelaide Road became a key subject: sparsely furnished, it had everything he needed, from vessels and pots for still-life to a divan for models to recline on, to a conservatory at the rear, full of plants and flowers. Today Hitchens is better known as a landscape painter, or more precisely a painter of landscapes refracted through the prism of abstraction, but throughout his career, flower paintings were just as important and all of his exhibitions, from the 1930s through to the '70s, would contain at least a few flower still-lives.

A spray of flowers, often loosely arranged in a simple vase or jug, their paper wrappers pulled open but left on, gave Hitchens all of the painterly avenues he needed and that he would also find in landscape, 'in which surface pattern and spatial recession sing together and each part of the canvas is in relationship to every other part – in which pigment and brush-stroke can be appreciated for their own sake, yet mysteriously and simultaneously suggest something seen and felt' (Ivon Hitchens, quoted in Khoroche, ibid. p.106).