Ivon Hitchens

Waddington Galleries, London

The Everard Read Gallery, Johannesburg, where acquired by the previous owner circa 1988

Their sale, Replica Shoes 's London, 10 May 2012, lot 116, where acquired by the present owner

London, New Grafton Gallery, Hitchens & Heron, 26 February - 4 April 1986, no. 7

In River at Avington No. 4, Ivon Hitchens captures the character of the English countryside not through meticulous detail, but through fluid brushstrokes that sweep laterally across the canvas. These panoramic passages of paint guide the eye along the meandering river and generate a dynamic interplay of colour, form, and movement.

Hitchens’s palette intensifies the emotional charge of the scene. Deep blues and purples merge with vibrant greens, while bold sweeps of yellow evoke the warmth of sunlight glancing across water or filtering through trees. Here, colour functions not simply as visual description but as structure: cooler tones create depth and stillness, while flashes of yellow animate the composition. Influenced by Paul Cézanne’s attention to form and chromatic harmony, Hitchens unites observation with sensation, creating a visual poetry that carries mood and atmosphere.

Executed during his years in West Sussex, the present work exemplifies Hitchens’s lifelong pursuit of a personal language of landscape painting, one that balances memory and emotion with compositional order. The freer, more assertive brushwork and relaxed spatial structure signal his decisive move away from naturalism towards a more abstract expression of his environment. Ultimately, River at Avington No. 4 offers not a fixed view of a particular site, but a sustained meditation on its atmosphere. It is a testament to Hitchens’s singular ability to translate the inner life of nature into paint.