Cottage Interior, Evening

In the years of 1937 and 1938, Ivon and Mollie Hitchens were staying at Holbrook in Suffolk, lodging in a 17th Century mill house that overlooked the surrounding countryside. The house ‘still faces across to the lake, whose waters and tree-fringed shore are the jealous preserve of fisherman. A path beside a stream winds under willows whose patter of leaves and branches reflected in the water instantly evokes a ‘Hitchens’. Eventually it leads out to a view of the wide waters of the Stour estuary' (P. Khoroche, Ivon Hitchens, Aldershot, 2007, p. 66). The panoramic vistas that could be seen across the landscape from this location would have appealed greatly to the artist, and it is the paintings he did at this time that start to formalise the mature style that was to later become synonymous within his oeuvre.

Painted in the double square format that was to become a recognised trademark for the artist, the present work is a powerful interior view from Hitchens’ early career. There are several vertical divisions to the horizontal composition, giving us a multitude of different perspectives in an acutely modern manipulation of space. The verticals, however, seem to lean to one side, recalling the cubism that is evident in masterworks such as House and Farm at Jas de Bouffan, 1887, by Paul Cézanne. The surface of the work is vigorously brushed, delighting in pattern and colour, despite the rather gloomy looking day outside. ‘As always with Hitchens, there was both the demand of the visual experience – the scene in front of him – and the demand of the picture itself, in purely aesthetical terms’ (P. Khoroche, ibid, p. 67).