Ivon Hitchens

(British, 1893-1979)

August 1950 No.3 40.7 x 74.3 cm. (16 x 29 1/4 in.)

Footnotes

Provenance
With The Leicester Galleries, London
With Victor Waddington, London, 4 November 1974 (as Nude, August 1950), where acquired by
Mr and Mrs Walter L. Newton, thence by family descent to the present owner
Private Collection, U.K.

Exhibited
London, The Leicester Galleries, New Painting: Watercolours by Kenneth Rowntree: Recent works by Claude Vernard: New paintings by Ivon Hitchens, November 1950, cat.no.7
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh International Exhibition of Contemporary Paintings, 16 October-14 December 1952, cat.no.114 (as Nude No.3)

The present work belongs to a sequence of at least five such canvases, each entitled August 1950. In other traced examples (numbers 2 and 4) the female model is similarly posed, curled, and viewed from behind, and similarly positioned within the composition. In each the warm radiant tones associated with the high summer season of their execution are complimented by cool greens and sumptuous browns. This particular painting differentiates itself from the other traced works slightly, as here Hitchens has given greater description to the model's surroundings. We can discern a plant pot with a lone bloom above the figure's head populating the pictorial space, and the receding ochre mark to her left and vertical white bar above her, provide a dimensionality absent from the other more abstract examples.

A concurrent 1950 series, each titled Summer Nude, adopt a similar approach and common palette, with the model viewed from the front (see Summer Nude No.2, sold in these rooms on 21 November 2021). Indeed throughout 1948, 1949 and 1950 Hitchens produced several series of progressions on themes of the nude. He exhibited twenty-seven of these canvases, including four August 1950 nudes, at the Leicester Galleries in November 1950. This was a daring move from an artist, who whilst revered, was rarely thought of as bombastic. At the time Hitchens was highly celebrated as a landscape painter, with two recent museum exhibitions staged in the space of five years, and a string of commercial post-war one-man shows to his name. It would have been expectant for his next venture to be an incremental evolution of style, rather than a revolution of subject. Yet his pluck was appreciated, with Percy Wyndham Lewis commenting:

'When an artist has evolved a manner so intensely personal that a picture of his can be recognized a half-a-mile away, and has for a number of years remained pretty stationary, it is most unusual for him to break the spell and open up on us with a new line. Yet this is what has happened at the Leicester Galleries where Ivon Hitchins [sic] has broken out of his brown web and revealed to our astonished gaze a large recumbent nude female. What is one to say, except congratulate him on this comely girl, and wait to see what is going to happen next.' (Percy Wyndham Lewis, The Listener, 9 November 1950, p.508).

We are grateful to Peter Khoroche for his assistance in cataloguing this lot.