Approaching nearly two metres wide and comprising an array of sumptuous green-blues and broad, sweeping brush strokes, the present work perfectly expresses Hitchens’ desire to provide the viewer an all-encompassing experience of nature. The array of marks, shifting and transforming, crossing in front and behind one another, hint at water, foliage, reflections and sky; it is this very ambiguity which draws one in and gives a far more direct and emotional response than a traditional representation of the landscape. Having learned from Gauguin, Van Gogh and Matisse, Hitchens was fully aware of the expressive rather than descriptive potential of colour. Combined with his abstract approach, Hitchens - in a quiet corner of Sussex - was one of the most daring and remarkable landscape painters of his generation.

Having left London during the Second World War (his studio was bombed in early raids), Hitchens found sanctuary in a simple set-up in Lavington Common, near Petworth, surrounded by six acres of woodland, which profoundly impacted his work and shaped such an original and personal output. As Patrick Heron in the 1950s observed:

Like Lanyon, Hitchens was concerned with the means of expressing the experience of a place, rather than the mere representation of a place. Avington is a village in Hampshire where the river Itchen runs nearby, and the present work belongs to a small series inspired by it. The painting was purchased shortly after being painted in the 1960s, and has remained in the same private collection until now. Hitchens sought a visual music in his work, ‘my pictures are painted to be ‘listened’ to…' (the artist, quoted from ‘Notes on Painting’, ARK 18 (Journal of the RCA), 1956). The re-emergence of this seminal work is an assured testament to that.