Ivon Hitchens by Alan Bowness (Inscribed by Ivon Hitchens)

Edited by Alan Bowness
With an introductory essay by T. G. Rosenthal

Ivon Hitchens was born in 1893. For the last thirty years he has lived and painted in West Sussex, and it is the countryside of that part of England that is the stimulus and the theme for so much of his work. This book includes 192 reproductions of paintings, 123 of them in colour, as well as illustrations of the artist at work. Alan Bowness has edited the monograph, with considerable and generous help and advice from the artist himself. In addition to providing biographical notes, a list of exhibitions, bibliography, and catalogue of illustrations, he contributes one of the two long introductory essays. He discusses the development of Hitchens’ work from the 1920s to the present, paying particular attention to the critical reception accorded to exhibitions and to the artist’s own statements about his painting. In his essay about ‘one of the strangest and most paradoxical figures in the history of modern painting in England’, T. G. Rosenthal writes of the artist’s consistency and privacy, and takes especial note of the relatively unknown mural paintings and nude studies.

This handsome volume is a tribute to the artist in his eightieth year, and a witness in itself to the sheer sensual delight and intellectual daring of one of England’s great colourists and a master of pictorial composition.

Condition: very good. Some spotting to endpapers, pastedowns, edges of text-block and to rear of dust-wrapper. Dust-wrapper a little worn to extremities.

Inscribed by Hitchens to front endpaper: “To Sheila and Sally, From the Past to the Future – from I.H”