Ivon Hitchens (British, 1893-1979)
Forest: O Hurry to the Ragged Wood
signed 'Hitchens' (lower right); further signed, inscribed and dated 'Forest. 'O hurry to the ragged wood,'/1971/by IVON HITCHENS/PETWORTH. SUSSEX.' (on a label attached to the stretcher)
oil on canvas
51.4 x 105.4 cm. (20 1/4 x 41 1/2 in.)
Footnotes:
Provenance
With Jonathan Clark & Co., London
Private Collection, U.K.

Exhibited
London, Waddington Galleries, Ivon Hitchens: Retrospective Exhibition, 16 May-9 June 1973, cat.no.30

Literature
Alan Bowness, Ivon Hitchens, Lund Humphries, London, 1973, p.112

As he painted the present work, Hitchens approached his 80th year. He had enjoyed a long and lauded career and his position as one of Britain's dearest modern painters had been confirmed by a major retrospective staged at the Tate in 1963. He continued to paint with fervour into his final decade, with a fresh influence arising from the purchase of a house at Selsey Bill. This coastal property, approximately twenty miles south from his rambling twenty-four-acre woodland estate near Petworth, introduced a vibrancy to Hitchens' palette more riotous than employed in his painting hitherto.

There are several themes which dominate the works from this period, among them a group of pictures which employ musical references. Hitchens had long used musical rhetoric to discuss painting, and as early as 1933 stated that he strived to paint the 'musical appearance of things'. In the later years a gramophone was positioned in the corner of his studio to play his wide and varied record collection as he worked (with opera being a particular favourite). His wife Mollie played piano beautifully, which could occasionally be heard from the house nearby. Although a longstanding influence for Hitchens, musical references became more direct in his late paintings, such as the series titled Boat and Foliage in Five Chords.

A similar, although less prevalent, influence of this period can be traced to Hitchens's enjoyment of poetry. He kept a much-marked copy of Shelley by his bed and would quote Tennyson when the occasion called. The present work is one such example, taking its title from the first line of the final stanza of W.B. Yeats's 1904 poem The Ragged Wood. A tale of mismatched love, it concludes:

O hurry to the ragged wood, for there
I will drive all those lovers out and cry
O, my share of the world, O, yellow hair!
No one has ever loved but you and I.

Yeats's woodland setting will have likely appealed to Hitchens's sensibilities, and he painted another work by the title O Hurry Where by Water Among Trees, taken from the poem's first line.

We are grateful to Peter Khoroche for his assistance in cataloguing this lot.
This lot is subject to the following lot symbols: AR
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