Footnotes

Provenance
Private Collection, U.K.

In 1955, in his monograph for The Penguin Modern Painters, fellow artist Patrick Heron wrote that 'for Hitchens, colour is light, and light is space'; a notion that remained true throughout Hitchens' career. Painted in 1970, the present work emerged during a highly productive period for Hitchens, and by this time he was at the peak of his artistic powers and enjoying widespread recognition, not only from his peers, but also from the broader art establishment. His retrospective at the Tate Gallery in 1963 was a pivotal moment in his career, marking his 70th birthday and affirming his status as a leading figure in British modernism.

Success enabled him, among other things, to acquire an old, forgotten orchard on the edges of his beloved and often-painted woodland, adding to his ever-growing West Sussex property, which by his death in 1979 covered around 24 acres of land surrounding the Hitchens' home Greenleaves, situated near Petworth in the vicinity of the rolling South Downs. This newly acquired spot provided a whole new domain for Hitchens to explore pictorially, with its own unique atmosphere and lyrical potential.

Colour, movement and texture fill every inch of this painting, leaving almost no exposed canvas bare; it is completely saturated with visual energy. We can almost hear the rustle of the wind through the leaves of the fruit trees, behind the swathes of grasses bowing in the breeze, the yellow ragwort glowing beneath, and the thicket of brambles closing in on the left. Hitchens had a remarkable ability to capture the genius loci – the unique spirit – of his West Sussex surroundings. His adeptness at distilling the character of the landscape into such expressive arrangements of colour, space, and rhythm are plain to see in this work, the third in a series depicting the newly acquired orchard.

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