Footnotes

Provenance
The Artist's Estate
With Waddington Galleries, London (as Tree, Sky & Ragwort (Giant Oak Series) aka Open Country with Ragwort), 25 March 1993, where acquired by
Miss Elizabeth Creak
Her Estate Sale; Bonhams, London, 28 May 2014, lot 66
With The Redfern Gallery, London, where acquired by the present owner
Private Collection, U.K.

Exhibited
London, Waddington Galleries, Ivon Hitchens, A Retrospective of Paintings, 3 March-3 April 1993, cat.no.14 (col.ill and cover detail)
London, The Redfern Gallery, Spring Exhibition: Modern British Art, 13 March-31 May 2019, unnumbered

Literature
Peter Khoroche, Ivon Hitchens, Andre Deutsch, London, 1990, pl.98 (col.ill)

Please note that this work has been authenticated by John Hitchens, the artist's son, and bears a studio stamp (verso).

Tree, Sky & Ragwort (Giant Oak Series) was one of the very last works that Hitchens' completed prior to his death in 1979, and his mastery of colour and form is plain to see. Filled with the speed and energy of a lifetime's experiment and practice and distilled into the simplest of visual languages, the work celebrates the landscape of the artist's beloved Sussex, that was the touchstone for much of his output.

Hitchens' work, particularly from the forties onwards, barrelled towards further abstraction, culminating in the evocative landscapes of his later work that epitomise the artist's oeuvre. His landscapes in particular can at times be quite challenging to decipher with their sweeping fields of vivid colour and abstract shapes and planes. These shifting patchworks of colour invite the participation of the viewer, as we are drawn in to examine the form and surface of each work.

Patrick Heron once said when describing one of Hitchens' woodland paintings in 1955, 'the tree is paint, and the paint is tree.' (Patrick Heron, quoted in Ivon Hitchens: Forty-Five Paintings, foreword by Alister Warman and Caroline Collier, Serpentine Gallery, London, 1989, p.5). In this work, the giant oak dominates the centre of the canvas. Boldly painted in deep browns and brilliant purples, put to canvas in sweeping painterly gestures, Hitchens brings to life the dark and brooding maturity and majesty of the tree, and draws the viewer into the landscape through this focal point. The oak is framed by the suggestion of a still-watered pond to the left, and the swathes of blues and orange above that hint at a sky at sunset. Flashes of the bright yellow of Ragwort flowers are licked at intervals across the canvas in languorous brushstrokes, at once almost entirely removed from the initial subject matter, and yet wholly anchored to it.

As Hitchens so succinctly stated, 'nature contains everything, really' (ibid., p.6). An evergreen source of inspiration for the artist even until his later years, Tree, Sky & Ragwort (Giant Oak Series) perfectly illustrates the boundless enthusiasm Hitchens had for his beloved landscape.

We are grateful to Peter Khoroche for his assistance in cataloguing this lot.