Young Family

In August 1940 when their Primrose Hill home was bombed, Hitchens his wife, Mollie and their baby, John moved as an emergency measure to Pulborough, and quickly decided to stay. The escape from London and the raids to the seclusion and tranquility of the Sussex woodland proved a turning-point in Hitchens's art. His canvases began to include figures; the present work, painted circa 1942, of a mother and child in a sunlit patch with the dark woods beyond exemplifying his recurrent theme of the innocent family group against the dark menace of war.