Ivon Hitchens

Alex Reid & Lefevre Gallery, London
Zwemmer Gallery, London
Leicester Galleries, London, where acquired by the parents of the present owner in 1970

London, Alex Reid & Lefevre Gallery, Summer Paintings by Ivon Hitchens, April 1935, cat. no.1;
London, Leicester Galleries, New Year Exhibition of Works by 19th & 20th Century Artists, January 1970, cat. no.51.

Unexamined out of frame. Original canvas. There is slight undulation to the upper right quadrant, with pin holes visible in the corners and at isolated intervals along the extreme edges, with a further pin hole appearing in the upper right quadrant. There is a slight pressure mark to the centre of the bottom extreme edge, only visible upon close inspection. There is very minor craquelure to the green pigment in the upper left quadrant, but this excepting the work appears in very good, original condition. Ultraviolet light reveals no obvious signs of fluorescence or retouching. Housed behind glass in a thick white-painted wooden frame. Unexamined out of frame. Please telephone the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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In the mid-1930s, Hitchens would spend successive summers on the wild, deserted coast near Sizewell in Suffolk, renting a tin-roofed cottage on the beach from Richard Bedford, Keeper of Sculpture at the Victoria & Albert Museum and fellow member of the ‘Seven & Five’ exhibiting society. This empty coastline – long before it would be dominated by a nuclear power station – provided the perfect setting for Hitchens to shape the vision that would sustain him throughout his long and illustrious career: a marriage of purely abstract concerns of pictorial design – colour, form, line, brushstroke – with a naturalistic depiction of the world, albeit one not strictly topographical but concerned more with describing the essence of a place.

In Sun-Bather, bands of loosely-applied colour, one laid above the other, evoke a sense of distance, from the tops of the dunes to the sea beyond, whilst never losing their feeling of being pure marks, resting flat on the canvas. The patterned rug and bright red cushion on which the figure sits similarly tip up, working against the perceived perspective, instead aligning with the physical parameters of the canvas’s edge, as a purely abstract (and expressive) sensation of colour. As in all of Hitchens' work of the mid-30s, the off-white primed ground of the canvas is visible between these sensuous islands of colour, although here, with considerable élan for a painting of this era, primer accounts for almost half the painting. This leaves the viewer in no doubt that this is ‘Modern’ art ­– the painting as an arrangement of forms on a flat surface rather than a 'window' into another space beyond. And yet still, under Hitchens' hand, this literal assertion of the painting’s ‘object-ness’ seems to evaporate into light and space: in the end, it is this solid untouched white that gives this painting its sense of air.

Myfanwy Piper – who met her husband John whilst she was staying with Hitchens at Bedford's cottage in 1934 ­ – later remembered these summers at Sizewell as truly idyllic, where these young, artistic friends could escape from traditional social conventions and embrace the optimism of modernity. Myfanwy could be the sitter in Sun-Bather, but it is most likely to be Molly Cranford-Coates, who Hitchens was to marry the following year,  and bring back to these shores on honeymoon. In many ways, it is a decidedly English version of Manet's Déjeuner sur l'herbe: the female subject doesn't confront the viewer with her nudity, but instead ignores our gaze, quietly, intently reading her book. The viewer, too, is not the nattily-dressed ‘man about town’ implied by Manet (through the ciphers of the two men who lounge beside the unclothed mademoiselle); instead we take the place of the painter himself, stepping to one side of the easel and surveying a scene where sky, land and figure are all part of a single harmonious world, that fades naturally, blissfully, out to white.