The present work was part of the collection of F.R.S. Yorke (1906-1962), one of the most important British architects of the modern age. Studying architecture and planning at the Birmingham School of Architecture, his seminal publication, The Modern House (1934), increased awareness and appreciation of modernist domestic architecture in Britain, focussing particularly on English examples. His follow-up article in the Architectural Review of 1936 included a further eleven English houses, notable for their use of concrete. His research laid the foundations for the post-war fascination with concrete in Britain, most prominent in the exposed, unpainted concrete of Brutalist architecture (Harry F. Mallgrave, Modern Architectural Theory – A Historical Survey, 1673-1968, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009, p. 314). In 1944, he formed the Yorke Rosenberg Mardall partnership with Eugene Rosenberg (1907-1990) and Cyril Mardall (1909-1994), with whom he would go on to design a number of important buildings, including Gatwick Airport.

He acquired April Nude No. 1 from a selling exhibition of Ivon Hitchens’ recent work at The Leicester Galleries, London, in November 1950. Studying at the Royal Academy of Art, Hitchens became a member of the ‘London Group’ of artists in the 1930s, before moving into a caravan in woodland near Petworth, West Sussex, after his house was bombed in 1940. In the present work, painted in 1949, he references the art-historical tradition of the female nude, but renders form in a highly stylised, sophisticated manner, typical of his painting of this period. With contours carefully picked out in earthy oranges, reds and browns, a sense of primality suffuses the composition, a highly modern return to nature that both reflects the influence of his woodland landscape paintings and reveals the obvious appeal to a modern architect such as F.R.S. Yorke.