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Lot Essay
In 1939, while staying on a farm near Lavington Common, below the South Downs not far from Petworth in Sussex, Ivon and Molly Hitchens bought six acres of local woodland. They had already purchased a gypsy caravan for £20, and the woodland was the perfect place to keep it. Birch, larch and thickets of rhododendron were cleared and an open habitable patch emerged. Plans for a brick-built studio were drawn up and set in motion. The following year, 1940, the family moved out of London after Hitchens’ Hampstead studio sustained bomb damage. The caravan on Lavington Common was to be their new home as they went back to nature with a vengeance, living without running water or electricity, in the soft light of paraffin lamps.
The move to Sussex liberated Hitchens, and he was filled with new energy and inventiveness. Undoubtedly this was due as much to daily contact with nature as to relief at being away from the bombing. His work changed, engaging more directly with his rural surroundings and becoming more fluid and yet paradoxically more structured, the space in his paintings now reflecting what he saw around him in the woods, the subject literally on his doorstep. He also enjoyed drawing and painting figures in this landscape, and who better to model for him than his wife and son?
‘John’ was Hitchens’ young son, born in London in 1940 before the move, and ‘Jordan’ was the pet name for the tin bath in which the family washed. This was kept beneath the caravan. Although the title John by Jordan has a biblical ring to it, and even a slanting echo of J.B. Priestley’s 1939 play Johnson Over Jordan (the humour backed up by the slang meaning of jordan – a chamber-pot), the subject of mother and child is an eternal and essential one, common to all cultures. Hitchens managed to capture something of the newly-discovered rural peace and a sort of Golden Age primal innocence in his depictions of wife and son in a sunlit forest glade. This was before any more permanent dwelling was built on the site, and the family really did live like gypsies in a green and scarlet caravan.
This painting is a wonderful statement of affirmation, of life renewed and celebrated in the safety of woodland Sussex. Its positive mood stands in supreme contrast to the prevailing anxiety and restrictions of wartime London, and the bright bold colour and generous brushstrokes loaded with paint are full of vigour. This is an unusually complete image in the loosely-related series known as ‘John by Jordan’, some of which are decidedly sketchy and unfinished. It is also a particularly fine example of Hitchens’ new style.
The scene depicted is not exactly the Garden of Eden, however, for a few modern appurtenances have crept into it. For instance, Molly Hitchens is seated in a striped deckchair (a pictorially useful source of colour and pattern), and there is a tall wooden stool to the left of the composition, on which a green jug of flowers is perched, containing what looks like the brilliant red-orange of poppies. There are various other suggested items: mats or a blanket, towels, standing flower pots, even perhaps a wheelbarrow, all arranged in a concentric pattern around the deep golden silhouette of the baby boy, a lively and vital figure which quite properly dominates the image. He has something of the assurance and energy of a dancing cherub, a putto from a Renaissance allegory. (Hitchens, for all his Modernism, was much drawn to Italian Quattrocento painting.)
The colour scheme employs a range of yellows, deep red, a lucent green, set off with white, various blues, pink and lilac. This lively palette replaced the typical sage green, grey and beige brown of the 1930s, and conveys a new feeling of joy. There are suggestions of Matisse and Bonnard in the crowded but carefully orchestrated composition of colour patch and vivid gesture, though the pictorial action is concentrated and compressed very effectively within a shallow space, in this case without evoking the dark surrounding woodland that appears in others of the John by Jordan series. Richly but tightly constructed with lyrical precision, this painting illustrates Hitchens’ belief that ‘All the while there should be a dialogue between artist and canvas, so that the picture grows from both ends, like stalactite and stalagmite.’ Hitchens’ formal engagement with colour and shape has rarely been so intimately achieved.
We are very grateful to Andrew Lambirth for preparing this catalogue entry. Andrew Lambirth’s latest book is The Art of Richard Eurich. He is currently curating Celebrating Michael Ayrton: A Centenary Exhibition at The Lightbox, Woking, May - August 2021.
The move to Sussex liberated Hitchens, and he was filled with new energy and inventiveness. Undoubtedly this was due as much to daily contact with nature as to relief at being away from the bombing. His work changed, engaging more directly with his rural surroundings and becoming more fluid and yet paradoxically more structured, the space in his paintings now reflecting what he saw around him in the woods, the subject literally on his doorstep. He also enjoyed drawing and painting figures in this landscape, and who better to model for him than his wife and son?
‘John’ was Hitchens’ young son, born in London in 1940 before the move, and ‘Jordan’ was the pet name for the tin bath in which the family washed. This was kept beneath the caravan. Although the title John by Jordan has a biblical ring to it, and even a slanting echo of J.B. Priestley’s 1939 play Johnson Over Jordan (the humour backed up by the slang meaning of jordan – a chamber-pot), the subject of mother and child is an eternal and essential one, common to all cultures. Hitchens managed to capture something of the newly-discovered rural peace and a sort of Golden Age primal innocence in his depictions of wife and son in a sunlit forest glade. This was before any more permanent dwelling was built on the site, and the family really did live like gypsies in a green and scarlet caravan.
This painting is a wonderful statement of affirmation, of life renewed and celebrated in the safety of woodland Sussex. Its positive mood stands in supreme contrast to the prevailing anxiety and restrictions of wartime London, and the bright bold colour and generous brushstrokes loaded with paint are full of vigour. This is an unusually complete image in the loosely-related series known as ‘John by Jordan’, some of which are decidedly sketchy and unfinished. It is also a particularly fine example of Hitchens’ new style.
The scene depicted is not exactly the Garden of Eden, however, for a few modern appurtenances have crept into it. For instance, Molly Hitchens is seated in a striped deckchair (a pictorially useful source of colour and pattern), and there is a tall wooden stool to the left of the composition, on which a green jug of flowers is perched, containing what looks like the brilliant red-orange of poppies. There are various other suggested items: mats or a blanket, towels, standing flower pots, even perhaps a wheelbarrow, all arranged in a concentric pattern around the deep golden silhouette of the baby boy, a lively and vital figure which quite properly dominates the image. He has something of the assurance and energy of a dancing cherub, a putto from a Renaissance allegory. (Hitchens, for all his Modernism, was much drawn to Italian Quattrocento painting.)
The colour scheme employs a range of yellows, deep red, a lucent green, set off with white, various blues, pink and lilac. This lively palette replaced the typical sage green, grey and beige brown of the 1930s, and conveys a new feeling of joy. There are suggestions of Matisse and Bonnard in the crowded but carefully orchestrated composition of colour patch and vivid gesture, though the pictorial action is concentrated and compressed very effectively within a shallow space, in this case without evoking the dark surrounding woodland that appears in others of the John by Jordan series. Richly but tightly constructed with lyrical precision, this painting illustrates Hitchens’ belief that ‘All the while there should be a dialogue between artist and canvas, so that the picture grows from both ends, like stalactite and stalagmite.’ Hitchens’ formal engagement with colour and shape has rarely been so intimately achieved.
We are very grateful to Andrew Lambirth for preparing this catalogue entry. Andrew Lambirth’s latest book is The Art of Richard Eurich. He is currently curating Celebrating Michael Ayrton: A Centenary Exhibition at The Lightbox, Woking, May - August 2021.