
Penny Day
Head of UK and Ireland
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£50,000 - £70,000
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Head of UK and Ireland

Head of Department

Director
Provenance
The Artist's Estate
With Jonathan Clark Fine Art, London, where acquired by
Private Collection, U.K.
"In those pre-war years Hitchens was very much part of the ferment of English Modernism. He was in close touch with Henry Moore and Ben Nicholson (his neighbours in Hampstead) and like them was experimenting with ever-greater abstraction in his work. Flowers, with their pure, intense colour inspired him to create compositions with a degree of autonomy more daring and extreme than that in the landscapes he was painting at the same time ... In many ways flowers are the ideal subject for a painter with Hitchens' particular gifts. They invite bravura technique – the magical elision of oil paint with the delicacy of leaf and petal - as well as inventive colour composition, both of which are Hitchens' trademarks." (Peter Khoroche in Ivon Hitchens, The Flower Paintings, exh.cat., Jonathan Clark & Co, London, 2007, unnumbered).
We are grateful to Peter Khoroche for his assistance in cataloguing this lot.