Spring Flowers

'I love flowers. I love flowers for painting ... One can read into a good flower picture the same problems that one faces with a landscape: near or far, meanings and movements of shapes and brushstrokes. You keep playing with the object.'
-Ivon Hitchens

It was after a visit to Bankshead in 1925, a small farmhouse in rural Cumbria, owned by Ben and Winifred Nicholson, that flowers became a substantial part of Hitchens' oeuvre. The house which had become somewhat of an artists' retreat, playing host to some of the top British contemporary artists of the day, from Paul Nash to David Bomberg, with its airy minimalist interiors inspiring Hitchens to produce his first series of flower paintings, a subject that he continued to revisit for the rest of his career. Tom Rosenthal recalled a conversation he had with Hitchens who spoke of how much he loved flowers and the still life subject, he recalled: ‘One can read into a good flower picture the same problems that one faces with a landscape, near and far, meanings and movements of shapes and brushstrokes. You keep playing with the object’. Through his depictions of flowers, Hitchen’s was able to play with colour and composition, making the canvases feel as alive as the natural subjects they depicted.

Still lifes had become somewhat of a diminished genre as the 20th Century progressed, and apart from a few notable exceptions such as Braque and Cézanne, both of whom were large influences on Hitchens’ own paintings, it had come to be considered a discipline reserved for academics and amateurs. However, with his abstracted compositions and bold use of colour, Hitchens breathed new life into his floral works, filling them with the same sense of energy as he did his celebrated landscapes. Throughout the 1930s, in particular, flower painting provided an opportunity for Hitchens to continue his experimentation with light and colour. Hitchens spoke of the preoccupations in his work: ‘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’. It was through these paintings that he elevated the everyday, bringing new attention to the still life genre.

Spring Flowers, painted circa 1936, is a wonderfully fresh example of Hitchens' still lifes from this early period. One can see the delight he took in his subject, with the vibrancy of his spring-like colours, and the rhythmical and free nature of his brushstrokes.

We are very grateful to John Hitchens for his assistance in preparing this catalogue entry.