Ivon Hitchens (1893-1979)

The double-square horizontal format, which Hitchens adopted for so many of his landscape paintings from 1936 onwards, could also work well, when tipped up vertically, to give a window view (an outstanding example being Balcony View, Iping Church (1943), now in the Courtauld Collection).

The colour patches and directional brush marks in Wooded garden from a window present an intriguing challenge to the viewer. It is by no means a simple matter of looking out of a window into a garden. For a start, the viewpoint is unclear: the latch of the window, at which the spectator might be thought to be standing, is deep into the picture, outlined in the white patch off centre to which the eye immediately goes, and seems to be rhyming with a garden bench beyond. It is as though the wooded garden had invaded the house, and perhaps it was this feeling of envelopment by dense masses of leaves and branches straining against each other that Hitchens wanted to convey. It was certainly a feeling with which he was familiar at Greenleaves, his woodland home in West Sussex.

P.K.