Ivon Hitchens

(British, 1893-1979)

April Flowers, Mostly Daffodils (Orange Centre) 60.6 x 50.5 cm. (23 7/8 x 19 7/8 in.)

Footnotes

Provenance
With Waddington Galleries, London
With Marjorie Parr, London, where acquired by the present owner
Private Collection, U.K.

Painted in 1975, April Flowers, Mostly Daffodils (Orange Centre) belongs to the final phase of Ivon Hitchens' career. The work was created just a year before the artist suffered a severe illness in 1976, when he developed Pleurisy and was hospitalised for several months. Though frail and increasingly aware of his own mortality, Hitchens in these years pushed his abstraction to its furthest limits. The paintings of the mid-1970s carry an extraordinary vitality and confidence, the hard-won summation of decades of experimentation. In them, every brushstroke, every juxtaposition of colour bears the weight of a lifetime's exploration of form and structure.

Though perhaps best known for his landscapes, flower painting was central to Hitchens' artistic output. The art historian T.G. Rosenthal rightly described him as an "absolute master" of the genre. Across his career, flowers offered Hitchens a way to experiment with ideas that stretched far beyond the boundaries of mere still life. As he himself explained: "I love flowers for painting. One can read into a good flower picture the same problems that one faces with a landscape, near and far, meaning and movements of shapes and brush strokes. You keep playing with the object." For Hitchens, flowers became a vehicle for exploring composition, colour, and rhythm, allowing him to push the boundaries of his painting in much the same way as his landscapes.

At first glance, the composition April Flowers, Mostly Daffodils (Orange Centre) appears elusive. Hitchens deliberately distracts the viewer from identifying familiar forms too quickly, insisting that the eye first explore the two-dimensional surface. The painting unfolds through the layering of warm and cool shades, of light and dark tones and of shifting textures and organic lines. Only after this visual journey does the composition reveal itself: the bowed heads of daffodils facing the viewer, perhaps with a glimpse of blue sky through a window on the right. Rather than three-dimensional shading, it is the overlapping and juxtaposing fields of colour that create the impression of depth of space.

The pictorial language of the present work is one of bold colour and expressive brushwork, which imbues the painting with energy. Hitchens was famously eclectic in his tools, often keeping over a hundred brushes in play at once. Broad decorator's brushes laid down sweeping passages of paint, while fine sable tips, or even the wooden handles of brushes scored into the surface to create intricate textures. In these late canvases, the brushwork takes on heightened importance, reflecting what Peter Khoroche described as "a maximum of expression by the minimum of means." The daffodils are rendered not as instantly recognisable flowers but as mosaics of colour, held together by the energy and rhythm of Hitchens' gestures.

Ultimately, this painting exemplifies the qualities that define Hitchens' work: bold colour, rhythmic brushwork, fluid composition and a refusal to be confined by genre. His flower paintings, rarely conventional, allowed him to push abstraction and blur the boundaries between still life and landscape, form and colour, surface and depth. In April Flowers, Mostly Daffodils (Orange Centre), the familiar motif of daffodils becomes a means to explore the essence of painting itself, turning the flat canvas into a space alive with rhythm, colour and life.

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