IVON HITCHENS (1893-1979)

Hitchens loved flowers and painted a number of flower still lifes throughout his career, from the more figurative pieces of the 1930s to the heightened abstraction demonstrated in the later works.

As Peter Khoroche has observed, 'Hitchens' treatment of flowers mirrors his treatment of landscape, and over the years they developed in parallel, such that some flower pieces could well be numbered as further variations of a landscape theme... 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. And, since flowers are living, moving things, he occasionally disposes them in the typical, panoramic landscape format that gives the viewer a sense of unfettered movement in space and time' (see P. Khoroche, exhibition catalogue, Ivon Hitchens The Flower Paintings, London, 2007).