Ivon Hitchens 1893-1979
Curving Canal with Overhanging Trees, No.1, 1958
oil on canvas
16 x 42½ ins
signed lower right

Provenance
Edward Lysaght Esq
Sir Phillip Hendy

Exhibited
Leicester Galleries, London, Ivon Hitchens, May 1959
Tate Gallery, London, Ivon Hitchens: A Retrospective Exhibition, 11 July-18 August 1963, Cat No 111, illustrated
Bradford City Art Gallery, 31 August-22 September 1963
City Museum and Art Gallery Birmingham, 28 September-20 October 1963



By the late 1950s the growing tendency towards simplification in Hitchens' work became particularly clear. As a Times reviewer wrote in 1958 'The [subject] reference has been getting bolder and freer as the colours have become progressively heightened and have broken away from one another into isolated patches'. This tendency is most obvious here in the white spaces of canvas Hitchens uses to isolate and ‘draw’ round the patches of darker and lighter colour, that lead the eye backwards and forwards up and down over the canvas, before finally focusing our attention on the ‘subject’ of the painting. In this instance it is the receding curve of the canal, just to the right of the canvas’s central point, delineated by the darker blue arch surrounding the paler yellows, pinky beiges and reds that then subtly move into the far background of the canvas. Hitchens was above all, absorbed by the idea of colour creating form and space - but as always, much of the strength of his painting also comes from that very distinct sense of a particular time and place that, for all the undisputed modernism of his colour and touch, places him within the English landscape traditions deriving from Constable, Turner and the Romantics.