拍品 127
  • 127

Ivon Hitchens

估價
60,000 - 80,000 GBP
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招標截止

描述

  • Ivon Hitchens
  • English Parkland
  • signed and dated 67; further signed, titled, dated 1966 and inscribed with the Artist's address on a label attached to the stretcher bar
  • oil on canvas
  • 46.5 by 142cm.; 18¼ by 56in.

來源

Waddington Galleries, London
Cork Street Gallery, London
Sale, Sotheby's London, 13th May 1992, lot 82
Austin/Desmond Fine Art, London, where acquired by the present owner, 30th June 1992

展覽

London, Waddington Galleries, Ivon Hitchens: Recent Paintings, 10th June - 5th July 1969, cat. no.4;
Norfolk, Narborough Hall, Ivon Hitchens, Paintings, 27th May - 27th August 2007, un-numbered exhibition.

Condition

Unexamined out of frame. Original canvas. There are pin holes in all four corner. The work appears in excellent overall condition. Ultraviolet light reveals a small area of fluorescence in the extreme bottom right corner which appears in keeping with the nature of the artists materials, and does not suggest retouching. Housed behind glass in a thick gilt wooden frame, set within a cream mount. Please contact the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
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拍品資料及來源

What is perhaps most remarkable about English Parkland, given the intensity of its colours and the energy of its paint surface, sustained without break across a five-foot wide canvas, is that it was painted when Ivon Hitchens was 70 years old. Here, then, is an artist not going gently into the night: he would continue to paint and exhibit right up to his death 12 years later. Rather this is a work of someone at the height of the powers, with four decades of experiment and experience behind them, in full control of a visual language – one that seamlessly blends both the figurative and abstract – that Hitchens had made all his very own.


Two years previously, Hitchens had bought a summer-house on the beach at Selsey, with an uninterrupted view over the shingle across the wide sweep of the bay. As Peter Khoroche has noted ‘The simplicity of shape, pared down to essentials – huge sky, open sea, curving shore – could hardly have provided a greater contrast to the luxuriant complexity of [the artist’s house and studio] Greenleaves’ (Peter Khoroche, Ivon Hitchens, Andre Deutsche, 1990, p.105) and buying the house at Selsey seems to coincide with a shift in Hitchens' colour - at first a move to soft, pastel oranges and yellows, but quickly turning to bright primaries. Hitchens, for all his diffidence and deliberate isolation from the London art world, was well aware of the high regard in which he was held by a younger generation of painters, the likes of Roger Hilton, Howard Hodgkin and especially Patrick Heron, whose 1955 monograph on Hitchens considers his work in almost purely abstract, Greenberg-ian terms. And in these paintings from the 1960s, Hitchens seems to be repaying the compliment, using a palette more akin to American painting, both Hard-Edge and Abstract Expressionist.


Hitchens retained this intensity as his eye moved from the shore at Selsey back, once again, to his beloved woodlands around Greenleaves. The patterns of the seasons moving through the trees once again required the greens, purples and brown so prevalent in his work from the 1950s, but now his blues feel more electric and the deep, warm tones find contrast with bright reds and yellow.


English Parkland is also a perfect demonstration of Hitchens’ trademark balance of figuration and abstraction, 'in which surface pattern and spatial recession sing together and each part of the canvas is in relationship to every other part – in which pigment and brush-stroke can be appreciated for their own sake, yet mysteriously and simultaneously suggest something seen and felt' (Khoroche, ibid. p.106). The painting divides into three parts – a curving progression in from the left, opening out to a wide, clear space in the middle, followed by a dense explosion of colour and brushwork to the right. This is painting as a ‘visual music’ (to use Hitchens’ own phrase), the work divided into three movements. Music can inspire a sense of landscape – of space and movement and of the elements – and yet is fundamentally abstract, a language in itself. In paintings such as English Parkland, Hitchens achieves, in painting what should perhaps be music's sole preserve.