Ivon Hitchens

Sold via Leger Galleries, to J.S.Bond, Cheltenham, for £60 in 1941
Crane Kalman Gallery, London, where acquired by the present owners, January 1959

There are artist's pinholes in all four corners. The canvas undulates across the surface. There a few flecks of paint loss in the left half of the paint surface. There is a small area in the centre of the painting where impasto appears to be pressing against the glass. There is no sign of retouching under ultra-violet light. Held under glass in a rectilinear gilded frame with a fabric cross-section. Please telephone the department on 020 7293 5381 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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Probably painted in the autumn of 1940, Young Wood is a superb example of Hitchens' very personal distillation of the principles of landscape painting in the context of modernism.

Aiming to capture the essence and experience of a location, the manner which he developed through out the 1940s was one which has an amazing capacity to evoke the actual feel of the countryside, the shade beneath a copse of trees, the scent of damp earth, the rustle of faded leaves about to fall, the movement of tall grasses in a breeze. By avoiding a reliance on topography and detail, Hitchens' paintings evoke a sense of a peculiarly English landscape which exists not only in quiet corners of woodlands and by slow rivers, but in our own minds and memories. This striving for an essential and timeless quality within the landscape is very much in keeping with much of the wonderfully varied British art produced at the time which we now gather together under the catch-all umbrella of neo-romanticism. A painting such as Young Wood, with its abundant undergrowth, jostling silver birch saplings and the pathway of trodden earth leading the eye off into the wood has a feeling of a familiar yet evolving location, much as we may sometimes notice the gradual creep of the seasons changing a place past which we walk every day. In this, Hitchens' work may perhaps be seen as a parallel to that of his contemporary John Piper, whose paintings of architectural subjects made during this same period also manage to evoke the reality of the present within the wider sense of the history of a place.  

Hitchens' remarkable capacity to render the sensation of a place was very much enhanced by his masterly ability to use his medium in a way that never disguises its actuality. Broad and heavily laden strokes of paint contrast with thin washes, whilst simple, almost calligraphic, flourishes provide the visual markers with which Hitchens defines the space of the painting. Indeed, Hitchens was very concerned with the underlying design of his paintings, and in the few sketches for paintings which have survived, some just as quick notations in letters, it is clear that his period of experimentation with abstraction in the mid-1930s was very important in helping to clarify his approach to pictorial composition. Like many of the paintings of this period, Young Wood is broadly tripartite in composition, allowing for alternate areas of recession and progression that are further developed by the use of balancing and contrasting colours and forms.

We are grateful to Peter Khoroche for his kind assistance with the cataloguing of this lot.