Ivon Hitchens
Painted the same Sussex woodland for forty years in wide horizontal canvases of broad wet colour.
Ivon Hitchens was born in London in 1893, trained at the Royal Academy Schools, and was part of the Seven and Five Society with Ben Nicholson and Henry Moore. In 1940 a bomb destroyed his London house and he moved permanently to Greenleaves, a caravan and then a house on six acres of woodland at Lavington Common in Sussex. Everything after that comes from that ground: pond, trees, bracken, water, painted in wide horizontal formats with a loaded brush in a small number of confident sweeps, at the edge of abstraction but never quite over it. He painted a mural for Cecil Sharp House and one for Nuffield College, and died in 1979.
The distinctive wide canvas is close to a signature and is also the practical issue, since these long narrow formats have often been reframed, restretched or, occasionally, cut down, and a reduced canvas is a materially different object. The paintings are unique and generally oil on canvas, signed on the reverse more often than the face, with the title inscribed there too. Watercolours and gouaches are numerous. Dating is frequently approximate and the handling changes markedly between the 1930s, the middle period and the very loose late works.
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