Ivon Hitchens (1893-1979)
Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's… Read more
Ivon Hitchens (1893-1979)

Three Trees

Details
Ivon Hitchens (1893-1979)
Three Trees
signed 'Hitchens' (lower right), signed again, inscribed and dated '"THREE TREES" 1959./IVON HITCHENS/Greenleaves/Petworth Sussex' (on a label attached to the stretcher)
oil on canvas
18 x 43 in. (45.7 x 109.2 cm.)
Provenance
Howard Bliss.
Anonymous sale; Christie's, London, 10 November 1989, lot 354.
with Galerie Michael Haas, Berlin.
with Jonathan Clark, London, where purchased by the present owner.
Exhibited
Berlin, Galerie Michael Haas, Ivon Hitchens, September - October 1994, no. 9.
Special notice
Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's Resale Right Regulations 2006 apply to this lot, the buyer agrees to pay us an amount equal to the resale royalty provided for in those Regulations, and we undertake to the buyer to pay such amount to the artist's collection agent.

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André Zlattinger
André Zlattinger

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Lot Essay

By the late 1950s Hitchens had begun to use freer, bolder brush marks in a more pared down overall design to give his paintings more punch. In general terms, this tendency, ever further away from naturalism towards greater abstraction, was to continue for the next two decades right up to his death. But this did not mean that he was any less involved in the experience of nature, which remained the indispensable source of his inspiration. Three Trees, for all its purely painterly, calligraphic brio, is about a specific moment in a specific place and about three trees, each very different from the other: it was painted in front of the motif - the thing seen in constant dialogue with the thing notated.

The painting was at one time owned by Howard Bliss, who was as much an evangelist as a collector of Hitchens. Through his kindness and enthusiasm, the Art Exhibitions Bureau was able, in the 1950s and 60s, to draw freely on his collection to tour a varying group of up to fifty works in all genres throughout the UK and, in 1961, in the main cities of Australia.

P.K.

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