Patchwork of Daisies and Marigolds

Location

Country: Korea, Republic of (South Korea)
City: Seoul
Place: British Embassy

Colour fills the canvas in this work by Ivon Hitchens with a myriad of reds, yellows and oranges, complemented by cooler tones of lilacs and pale blues. Hitchens’ use of strong tones and expansive, loose, brushstrokes suggests a patch-worked assemblage of colour and form, that conveys the luscious petals and shapes of a mass of flowers. His artistic style reveals an affinity with French Fauvist painters whom he much admired.
Pools, lakes and undergrowth in woodland settings were central themes of Hitchens’  ‘abstracted landscapes’ for almost 40 years. He was inspired by the views around his mainly single-storied house in a secluded part of rural Sussex, where he moved with his wife and son after his London studio was bombed in 1940. In this woodland setting he developed paintings on canvases that were more or less the shape of two adjacent squares – a ‘long shape’ that he had first adopted in 1936 and which subsequently became his artistic trademark. He found working on a square-shaped painting unsatisfactory ‘… because the natural flow of the horizontal is checked. The square shape is itself a unit which needs its counterpoint and in the “time” factor of a square shape it cannot be repeated or echoed in opposition’. Hitchens also wanted his compositions to be read and appreciated in a similar way to music, so his use of an extended canvas, reminiscent of the shape of a musical score, was a logical choice. Drawing attention to musical parallels in his work, Hitchens wrote in 1956: ‘I should like things to fall into place with so clear a notation that the spectator’s eye and aesthetic ear shall receive a clear message, a clear tune.’

The son of a painter, Ivon Hitchens was born in London and studied first at St John's Wood School of Art and then, until 1919, at the Royal Academy Schools. In 1920 Hitchens was a founder member of the artists' group, the Seven and Five Society, and exhibited regularly in their shows. During the war he moved with his family to rural Sussex where he lived and worked for the rest of his life, painting abstract landscapes in glorious colours on long, horizontal canvases. Hitchens produced a huge figurative mural for the English Folk Song and Dance Society at Cecil Sharp House in London. He was created CBE in 1958. Retrospectives of his work were held in Leeds in 1945 and at the Royal Academy in 1979.

Places

Subjects

still life, abstract, London Group, daisy, marigold, flower

Materials & Techniques

canvas, oil, oil painting

Artist

Ivon Hitchens (1893 - 1979)

Title

Patchwork of Daisies and Marigolds

Date

1957

Medium

Oil on canvas

Dimensions

height: 60.00 cm, width: 113.00 cm

Acquisition

Purchased from Leicester Galleries, March 1965

Inscription

br: Hitchens

Provenance

Collection of P. J. Goldberg; from whom purchased by Leicester Galleries, London; from whom purchased by the Ministry of Works in March 1965, as ‘Patchwork of Daisies and African Marigolds’

GAC number

6957