Ivon Hitchens

I VON H I TCH ENS Encounter in the Woods

goldmark • canon

Ivon Hitchens was born in London in 1893, the son of the painter Alfred Hitchens. He is widely regarded as the outstanding English landscape painter of the 20th century.

Hitchens studied art at the Royal Academy and was taught by John Singer Sargent and William Orpen. Later notable influences were the French Post-Impressionists Cezanne, Braque and Matisse. He was a member of the Seven and Five Society and the London Group. He represented Britain at the 1956 Venice Biennale and was created CBE in 1958. He died in 1979.

Immediately recognisable by its daring yet subtle use of colour and brushmark to evoke the spirit of place, his work is to be found in public and private collections throughout the world.

Price ÂŁ10

IVON H I TC H ENS Encounter in the Woods Peter Khoroche

goldmark In association with the Canon Gallery MMXIV

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Encounter in the Woods SCENE: West Sussex woodland on a wintry day early in 1956. Snow on the ground. The stillness is broken only by the sound of two men sawing and trimming chestnut saplings to make stakes. It is time for them to knock off for lunch. The fire, which they’ve made to keep themselves warm, is left to smoulder until they return.

Hardly have they gone when a thin figure, well wrapped in woollen scarves, with three layers of jumper under his poacher’s jacket and a beret perched on his head, emerges from the trees, takes one look at the gently burning fire and scurries away. He soon returns with a large kettle of water and promptly douses the fire, then waits for the two hapless woodsmen to reappear.

No one would ever have called Ivon Hitchens careless: his closest friends sometimes dared to tease him about his excessive caution. True enough, the dense woods that surrounded his home did, especially in a dry summer, present a fire risk, and a forest fire would have quickly destroyed not only his house but also the hundreds of paintings densely stacked within it. Even so, the two experienced foresters had taken the precaution of lighting their fire in an open space entirely surrounded by snow. They explained this patiently and a potentially inflammable situation was quickly damped down.

In fact, friendly feelings so far prevailed that Mr. Hitchens immediately engaged one of the men, Ted Floate, to come and thin out the tops of some birches next to his house, Greenleaves, hidden away in the woods close by.

The most unexpected outcome of this little incident is the painting, Two Woodsmen, which

Hitchens made of it soon afterwards and which he presented to Ted. In subject and style it is typical of his work in the mid-Fifties: the colour still basically naturalistic, the visual facts notated with economy, the direction of the brushmarks and the superimposition of colour shapes cleverly suggesting two, if not three, receding avenues, and the figures, even the poses, of the two woodsmen deftly evoked with a few dabs of paint (though at first they escape attention, so well do they blend with their surroundings). The characteristic areas of white primed canvas do not represent snow, as a distinguished American critic once opined, mistaking Hitchens for an Impressionist, but serve to accentuate the shape and thrust of the brushmarks, drawing attention to the abstract qualities of the painting, which are to be appreciated at the same time as one recognizes the scene they depict (including, bottom left, the dying embers of the offending fire).

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Ted Floate, 2013

Before long Ted Floate – quick, goodhumoured, with twinkling eye and burly build – proved himself adept at maintaining in a paintable state the dense woodland of oak, chestnut, pine and birch, the overarching tunnels of rhododendron and the ever encroaching sea of bracken in the magic domain of Greenleaves. How fitting that he should have in his collection samples of such classic Hitchens motifs as Plantation Drive, Larchwood Path and Winter Walk, subjects close to home, which Hitchens returned to again and again and which inspired many paintings in addition to those that bear these titles.

One painting with which Ted was closely involved is Sussex Dell with Footbridge 1956. As so often, Hitchens found his subject just yards away from his home, on the neighbouring Leconfield Estate. After gaining permission, he set Ted to rebuilding a half-rotten wooden footbridge, which he then introduced into the foreground of his painting as a horizontal element that links the two halves of the composition. This is the first and most naturalistic of three versions, which Hitchens painted one

after the other, in an attempt to do justice to the different facets of this humble-seeming subject while at the same time creating a picture that in its own terms, seen in the abstract, would be aesthetically right.

Hitchens is so pre-eminently a painter that it may come as a surprise to discover that he was also an accomplished draughtsman, who took every opportunity to draw the human figure in ink, charcoal, chalk, pencil or biro. Hundreds of figure drawings underlie his great mural painting, installed in Cecil Sharp House, the headquarters of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, in 1954, and although Hitchens himself regarded them as essentially working sketches, preliminary to the main task of painting, they deserve to be appreciated in their own right for their vitality, spareness and fluency. The drawings in this exhibition of Ted, wielding his axe as a professional forester, and of his family, also served as a basis for the figures in Hitchens’ large painting (12 x 24 ft.), Day’s Work, Day’s Rest.

In 1962 Hitchens presented this work to

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the newly founded University of Sussex and, together with Ted Floate, went in person to install it in the refectory, where it still hangs.

Now in his seventieth year, he found it difficult to keep his balance on top of a stepladder, and so entrusted to Ted the job of doing the small amount of retouching that became necessary once the four panels of the mural had been hung.

While he was doing this, two workmen entered the hall, stopped and stared at the complex, highly abstract painting, then asked the old gaffer at the foot of the ladder what he thought it was all about. ‘Don’t ask me. Ask the artist’, retorted Hitchens, pointing at Ted high above, paintbrush in hand.

Ted not only fulfilled the roles of woodsman and artist’s model but also, in due course, studio assistant. On Saturday afternoons he would be busy stretching and framing canvases in the studio. One always knew it was a Saturday because the kitchen table would be crowded with brown toast and white, jars of Sandwich Spread and Marmite, cherry jam, ginger cake, buttered bread, tins of shortbread – all anxiously provided by Mollie Hitchens to minister to the

healthy appetite of Ted Floate, who, after a few hours indoors, would already be yearning to get outside. On one such afternoon we were looking at a canvas with which the artist himself was dissatisfied, when Ted turned it upside down and promptly converted it into a near masterpiece: a distant city skyline silhouetted against a grey and pink sunset, seen through the arch of a bridge, with water in the foreground. Much amused, Hitchens suggested Suburban Bathing Pool for title. Like all of us who were privileged to visit the studio at Greenleaves regularly, Ted developed an eye for Hitchens’ unique painting language. He also acquired an intimate knowledge of the painter’s materials and working method.

Hitchens found plenty to interest his eye in his immediate surroundings and tended to regard as a tiresome interruption anything that called him away. Neither he nor his wife ever learnt to drive, so that all outings, near or far, involved hiring a car and a chauffeur. But of course he did leave home from time to time, whether on a fishing expedition or to visit friends in the neighbourhood, and in his later

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years he migrated south over the Downs to spend short periods at a seaside bungalow, which he had bought on impulse in 1965.

These excursions quite often led to the discovery of new painting motifs, to which he would later return with a carload of painting gear and other paraphernalia.

Home Farm, Iping (another version of which is in the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne) dates from the spring of 1944, when Hitchens and his wife returned to Iping, where they had stayed for a few weeks the previous year. Though only a few miles from home, on the other side of Midhurst, it provided a complete change of scene, especially welcome in wartime. The two stays at Iping inspired a clutch of lovely paintings, the best known probably being Balcony View, now in the Courtauld collection.

1944 also marked the beginning of Hitchens’ involvement with Terwick Mill on the River Rother, a few miles upstream from Midhurst.

This seemingly inexhaustible subject led to a series of well over twenty paintings (not all of

them numbered!) over the next two years. Each version highlighted some aspect of the mill or its pool or the surrounding trees at various times of day and in all weathers and changes of season.

Eight of these versions formed the nucleus of an exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London in 1989. The Terwick Mill in this exhibition is an early impression in which the artist is plotting out the separate components of the scene and how they might be related to one another – the bold line, from top left to right, suggesting horizontal movement, the small square of white, centre left, creating depth.

It would be easy to assume that Overshadowed Pool 1948, with its naturalistic colour and easily recognizable content, predates Red Stage 1948, where an old boathouse reflected in water and the faintly scratched in outlines of a boat, mast and oar are our only clues as to the identity of the scene, which otherwise is summarily evoked by a few bold colour patches. But in this forward-looking painting Hitchens has already begun to pare down the representational element and to free himself from a strict adherence to naturalistic colour. This was part

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of his continuing development towards ever greater abstraction: brushmarks, notating the observed facts in shorthand, combine with the full gamut of colour in paintings of great verve and assurance, with an internal logic of their own and only loosely connected – but still connected, nonetheless – with the landscapes, which are their jumping off point.

A superb example of this is Fen Dyke no.3 1968.

This will certainly have been triggered off by something seen and felt, most probably a sheet of water in Sussex that recalled memories of fenland in East Anglia. This vision of present reality intensified by past memory was stimulus enough for three paintings, one growing out of the other, each one an independent entity.

The decisive sweeps of the paint-loaded brush are a thrill in themselves and seem to proclaim Hitchens’ joy in the act of painting, unfettered by the cramping dimensions of a conventional canvas size, but instead ranging freely over the panoramic format that he had made typically his own, here in a ratio of 1:2 2/3. Down in the foreground an astonishing combination of colours is concentrated within a few inches.

Yet somehow we know that it is water that is being conjured up and our imagination works hard to link what we seem to see with something we ourselves have experienced somewhere sometime.

Turn now to the little watercolour, painted in the early 1920s, of the open country between Midhurst and the Downs, and see just how far Hitchens had come, in the intervening forty years, to reach Fen Dyke no.3. The one constant is the locale. His first experience of the South Downs was as a schoolboy at Bedales on the Sussex/Hampshire border in the early 1900s.

Then, in the years immediately after the 191418 war, while living in London, he would make regular expeditions to explore this part of Sussex on a bicycle, making small sketches, such as this one, in watercolour, gouache or tempera. When the German bombing raids forced him out of London in 1940, this was the obvious place to come and here, in West Sussex, he spent the rest of his life, drawing sustenance and inspiration both from the landscape and from his many memories of it.

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I remember a warm, grey, silent August day in 1973, the purple heather of Lavington Common harmonizing with the pale grey sky and slate-grey silhouette of the Downs. After a quick tea at Greenleaves we set off for a very slow meander in the car. First, through the tunnels of rhododendron and pink pine, across Graffham Common and past Hoyle Farm, then suddenly the wall of the Downs reared up straight ahead of us at Heyshott. We stopped and Ivon quietly took it all in, remarking on the moulded shapes of the hills and on how utterly different it all felt just a few miles further on at Didling. We took the track under the Downs, getting out of the car several times to stare at the fields of wheat or the cows grazing on the hillside. Harmonies of dull yellow, silver and grey stretching away on one side, steep chalkland, yews and beeches on the other. Ivon reminisced about the time, half a century earlier, when he had first discovered these parts.

‘Nowhere as beautiful in the whole of England,’ he murmured and pointed out a path he had once taken that led up to a barn and then right, up the hill, into the trees – secret hollows, a different world, amid groups of silent yews.

There is no need to recount in detail the rest of our outing, which turned into something of a church crawl, with visits to Cocking, Didling and West Lavington. Outwardly uneventful, it brought home to me how finely attuned Hitchens was to his surroundings and why what he painted was so much more than what he saw.

Peter Khoroche

Peter Khoroche was a friend of the artist and has written books on both Hitchens and Ben Nicholson.

He also wrote the catalogue for the 1989 Serpentine exhibition of Hitchens’ work.

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Catalogue of works in the exhibition

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1.

Plantation Drive

oil on canvas 1944 40.5 x 74 cm

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2.

Home Farm, Iping

oil on canvas 1944 46 x 76 cm

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3. Terwick oil on canvas 1944 41 x 74 cm

Mill

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4.

Larchwood Path

oil on canvas 1948 51 x 76 cm

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5. Winter Walk oil on canvas 1948 41 x 74 cm

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6.

Red Stage

oil on canvas 1948, signed 40.5 x 86 cm

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7.

Overshadowed Pool

oil on canvas 1948 41 x 79 cm

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8. Two Woodsmen oil on canvas 1956 41 x 86.5 cm

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9.

Footbridge over a Sussex Dell

oil on canvas 1956, signed 41 x 74 cm

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10.

Fen Dyke No 3

oil on canvas 1968, signed 41 x 109 cm

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11. The

Downs near Midhurst

watercolour early 1920s 26 x 37.5 cm

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12.

13.

charcoal, 31.1.61

ink, wash and red pigment, n.d.

14.

15.

pencil and red pigment, 26.1.61

charcoal and red pigment, 26.1.61

all drawings are c1961 and are on paper size 33 x 20.3 cm

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16.

17.

pencil

pencil

18.

19.

pencil

pencil

all drawings are c1961 and are on paper size 33 x 20.3 cm

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20.

21.

ink

pencil and red pigment

22.

23.

ink

pencil

all drawings are c1961 and are on paper size 33 x 20.3 cm

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24.

25.

ink, n.d.

charcoal, 31.1.61, signed

26.

27.

pencil, n.d.

charcoal, 31.1.61

all drawings are c1961 and are on paper size 33 x 20.3 cm

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Chronology

1893

3 March: Sydney Ivon Hitchens born at 35 Kensington Square, London, only son of Alfred Hitchens, painter, and Ethel Margaret, nee Seth-Smith. c. 1899 Paints his earliest surviving picture, Margate Pier with Paddle-Steamer.

1903-9 Attends Bedales School, Hampshire.

1911-19 Attends Royal Academy schools where, in addition to the regular training, he is briefly taught by visiting academicians: Orpen, Sargent, Clausen and Shannon.

1919 Acquires studio at 169 Adelaide Road, London NW3.

1920 Elected member of the newly formed Seven and Five Society, taking part in its first exhibition and all subsequent exhibitions until 1935.

1924 Stays with Claude Flight, Percy Jowett and Harold Williamson in a cave above the river Seine at Chantemesle, nr Vernon, Eure.

1925 Stays with Ben and Winifred Nicholson at Banks Head, Cumberland. First oneman exhibition, at the Mayor Gallery.

1929

First visit to Moatlands, East Grinstead nr Ashdown Forest, E. Sussex.

Elected member of the London Artists’ Association.

1931 Elected member of the London Group.

Holiday with Henry Moore and Ben Nicholson at Happisburgh on the Norfolk coast.

Paints at Hampton Lode on the river Severn, Shropshire, feeling an affinity for the landscapes of André Dunoyer de Segonzac.

1932-4 Absorbs influence of Georges Braque in still-life painting.

1934 Takes part in ‘Objective Abstractions’ exhibition at the Zwemmer Gallery together with Victor Pasmore and Ceri Richards.

1935 Marries Mary Cranford Coates.

Honeymoon at Sizewell. Last exhibition of the Seven and Five Society.

1936 Paints the first landscape in doublesquare horizontal format which is later to become a hallmark.

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1937

Elected member of the Society of Mural Painters.

Finally turns from the experiments in ‘reductive’ abstraction to develop a personal style of abstract figuration.

This marks the beginning of his maturity as a painter.

1939 Acquires a gipsy caravan and six acres of woodland at Lavington Common, W. Sussex.

1945 First retrospective exhibition at Temple Newsam House, Leeds (together with Henry Moore).

1948 Major exhibition at the Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield.

1951 Awarded a purchase prize at the Arts Council’s Festival of Britain exhibition ‘60 Paintings for ’51’.

1950-4 Paints mural for Cecil Sharp House, Regent’s Park Road, London, headquarters of the English Folk Dance and Song Society. It was the largest mural in the country.

1956

1957 1958 1960

1963 1976 1979

Represents Britain at the XXVIII Venice Biennale, shows in Vienna, Munich and Amsterdam.

Visits Paris to see the exhibition of his own work at the Musée d’Art Moderne.

Created CBE. First one-man exhibition at the Waddington Galleries.

Paints mural Day’s Work, Day’s Rest installed at the University of Sussex, nr Brighton in 1962.

Retrospective exhibition, organized by the Arts Council at the Tate Gallery.

Severe illness.

Retrospective exhibition at the Royal Academy.

17th July. Paints last picture 29th August: Dies at home.

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Galleries and Museums Possessing Works by Hitchens

Australia Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney Canada Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto Art Gallery of Vancouver France MusĂŠe National d'Art Moderne, Paris New Zealand Bishop Suter Art Gallery, Nelson National Gallery of New Zealand, Wellington Norway National Gallery, Oslo South Africa Tatham Art Gallery, Natal Sweden Gothenburg Art Museum United States Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo Smith Art Museum, Northampton, Mass.

Seattle Art Gallery Centre for British Art, Yale, New Haven, Conn.

United Kingdom Aberdeen Art Gallery Barnsley: Cannon Hall Museum and Art Gallery Bedford: Cecil Higgins Museum and Art Gallery Belfast: Ulster Museum Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery Bolton Museum and Art Gallery Bradford City Art Gallery Brighton Art Gallery Bristol: City Museum and Art Gallery Cambridge: Fitzwilliam Museum Cardiff: National Museum of Wales Chichester: Pallant House Gallery Eastbourne: Towner Art Gallery Edinburgh: Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art Glasgow Art Gallery Harrogate Art Gallery Hastings: Jerwood Gallery Huddersfield Art Gallery Kendal: Abbot Hall Art Gallery and Museum Kettering Art Gallery Kingston-upon-Hull: Ferens Art Gallery

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Leamington Spa: Warwick District Council Art Gallery and Museum Leeds: City Art Galleries Leicester: City Museum and Art Gallery Lincoln: The Collection Liverpool: Walker Art Gallery London: Courtauld Institute Galleries London: Tate Gallery London: Victoria & Albert Museum Manchester: City Art Gallery Manchester: Whitworth Art Gallery Middlesbrough Art Gallery Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Laing Art Gallery Norwich: Castle Museum Nottingham: Castle Museum and Art Gallery Oxford: Ashmolean Museum Portsmouth: City Museum Preston: Harris Museum and Art Gallery Rochdale Art Gallery Rugby Art Gallery and Museum Rye Art Gallery Salford Art Gallery Scarborough Art Gallery Sheffield: City Art Galleries Southampton Art Gallery Swansea: Glynn Vivian Art Gallery

Swindon Museum and Art Gallery Wakefield: City Museum and Art Gallery Worthing Museum and Art Gallery

Also in the Following Collections Arts Council of Great Britain British Council Chichester: University College, Otter Gallery Contemporary Art Society Department of the Environment Government Art Collection Queen Mary College, London University of London, Senate House University College, London University of Sussex Various colleges at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge

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Notes

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Published to accompany the exhibition at Goldmark Gallery in March 2014 In association with The Canon Gallery All rights reserved www.goldmarkart.com

ISBN 978-1-909167-09-4 Essay © Peter Khoroche 2014 Photography © Jay Goldmark/Christian Soro Design Porter/Goldmark

The Canon Gallery Nr Oundle 01832 280451

Goldmark Gallery 14 Orange Street Uppingham Rutland, LE15 9SQ 01572 821424

A woodcutter’s chance encounter with the painter Ivon Hitchens in 1956 has led to an important exhibition of 10 previously unseen oil paintings by Hitchens at Goldmark Gallery.

Following their meeting, Ted Floate the woodcutter and Ivon Hitchens became close companions until the artist’s death in 1979.

Ted worked for Hitchens on the artist’s estate and also helped with framing of the paintings and even technical advice.

Hitchens regularly gave his friend paintings and drawings, which even in those days was a considerable gift, filling Ted’s cottage with an amazing collection of Modern British Romantic art. At 85, Ted has now decided to sell.

Ted’s story of his work and friendship with Hitchens brings a deep insight into the artist’s life.

Films Visit goldmarkart.com to view our online films which feature Peter Khoroche and Ted Floate discussing Hitchens and the paintings.

‘How fitting that Ted Floate, forester and studio assistant, should have in his collection paintings of classic Hitchens motifs, inspired by the woodland surrounding and enclosing the artist's home.’ Peter Khoroche

goldmark Uppingham, Rutland