Ivon Hitchens

(British, 1893-1979)

London Painting 76.8 x 152.4 cm. (30 1/4 x 60 in.)

Footnotes

Provenance
The Artist's Estate
With Ivor Braka, London, 7 April 1986, where acquired by the present owner
Private Collection, U.K.

Exhibited
London, Royal Academy of Arts, British Art in the 20th Century: The Modern Movement, 15 January-5 April 1987, cat.no.177 (col.ill.)

It is particularly fitting to be offering this impressive and important oil painting by Ivon Hitchens dating from the early 1930s in the same auction as the C.S. Reddihough collection (see lots 1-42). It is unlikely the Yorkshire based collector owned any works by Hitchens, but the artist was extremely good friends with Ben Nicholson at the time Reddihough befriended and began to support him. 'Early in 1925 Hitchens went to stay with Ben and Winifred Nicholson at Banks Head, their farm house on the Roman Wall near Brampton in Cumberland. Both Ben Nicholson and Hitchens were still feeling their way towards a personal painting language...Between them there was a stimulating exchange of ideas and a sharing of enthusiasms. Each painted in a separate part of the house: Winifred upstairs at the western end, Ben in the barn at the eastern end, and Ivon in the kitchen parlour, until, after a month, the Nicholsons returned to their flat in London, leaving Hitchens in sole command at Banks Head and free to paint where he liked.' (Peter Khoroche, Ivon Hitchens, Lund Humphries, Surrey, 2014, p. 28). Within the following two years Cyril Reddihough had also visited Banks Head to meet with Ben Nicholson and declare his admiration for his work.

The two artists had first met in 1924 when they were both in their early 30s. Hitchens had seen an exhibition of Ben Nicholson's work at the Adelphi Gallery and thought they were interesting so invited him to join the Seven and Five Society. Hitchens himself had been introduced to the society in 1920 which allowed him to exhibit with like-minded artists at a time when he was not yet established as an artist. The period was pivotal for all three painters, Ben Nicholson, Winifred Nicholson and Ivon Hitchens; but especially so for the latter, as following his time at Banks Head Hitchens returned to London and persuaded Fred Mayor, an influential and innovative dealer to give him his first one-man exhibition. Over half of the works had been painted at Banks Head, a number of which depicted semi-abstracted interior scenes in a refreshing style and palette. These are Hitchens' early modernist works, using a pictorial vocabulary similar to Ben and Winifred, which anticipated his most critically acclaimed period of the early 1930s.

The introduction of Ben Nicholson to the Seven and Five Society was crucial to its development and longevity. It was Ben who was responsible for persuading the likes of Barbara Hepworth and Christopher Wood to participate and it was him who filtered the doctrines of George Braque into their way of approaching both the design of a picture and the use of colour to influence its impact.

In the expansive canvas London Painting, likely an interior scene of Hitchens' Hampstead studio, the sinuous outline of a reclining female nude lies across the lower edge. Through her, and above, the room has been largely abstracted and described with exciting passages of vibrant colour. Perhaps they denote windows, patterned carpets, plant foliage and a bed frame. Their ambiguity is a large part of the picture's appeal which is among Hitchens' most ambitious and successful from this seminal period. It was one of only three oils by the artist exhibited at the monumental Royal Academy of Arts exhibition in 1987, British Art in the 20th Century, The Modern Movement (see exhibition details above).