Ivon Hitchens

Leicester Galleries, London, where acquired by Dr. Solomon Kaufman, London, February 1940
Bequest of the above in 1999

Glasgow, British Empire Exhibition, May - October 1938;
London, Royal Academy of Arts, Ivon Hitchens, A Retrospective Exhibition, 21st March - 25th April 1979, cat. no.9 (as Landscape), illustrated p.11, with tour to Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, Newlyn Art Gallery, Penzance, Ferens Art Gallery, Kingston-upon-Hull, and Castle Museum, Nottingham.

Original canvas. Something has become caught between the canvas and the stretcher causing a small protrusion in the upper left corner. There are artist's pinholes in the lower corners and a further pinhole along the left of the lower edge. There is an area of lifting paint to the dark purple and mauve pigment upper left and to the light brown pigment lower centre. There are additional areas of lifting to the light grey pigment upper left and to the tree in the upper right corner, with resultant flecks of paint loss. The surface is slightly dirty and may benefit from a light clean. Ultraviolet light reveals pigments which fluoresce but these appear to be the hand of the artist. Held in a painted plaster frame with a canvas inset. Please telephone the department on 020 7293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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Aiming to capture the essence and experience of a location, the manner which Hitchens developed in the late 1930s and early 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. The search 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 this, with its abundant undergrowth, jostling silver birch saplings and the pathway of trodden earth leading the eye off into the distance 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, Winter Trees 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.

Although a label on the back of the frame indicates that the picture was shown at the artist's exhibition at the Leicester Galleries in February 1940 as Landscape, the work was not in fact included in the exhibition but sold from stock at that time to Dr. Kaufman. The correct title of the work is Winter Trees as according to Hitchens' despatch book. In the catalogue entry for The Royal Academy Retrospective Exhibition from 1979 it is suggested the present work could correspond to cat. no.54, Winter Glade, from the 1940 Leicester Galleries exhibition however, this is in fact a different painting.

We are grateful to Peter Khoroche for his kind assistance with the cataloguing of the present work.