Ivon Hitchens, considered a progressive in the 1920’s and ‘30s, was one of the earliest members of the experimental Seven and Five Society alongside Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth. However, his post-War retreat to the seclusion of his Sussex home gave inspiration to the landscape paintings that become Hitchens’ primary occupation, and hence the work for which he is best known. Hitchens found sanctuary in a simple set-up in Lavington Common, near Petworth, surrounded by six acres of woodland, which profoundly impacted his work and shaped such an original and personal output. Rooted in the English landscape, ‘Late Summer Distance’ exemplifies the artists skill in encouraging the viewer to regard “trees, foliage, water earth and sky with a unique closeness” and, by extension, “Hitchens’s extraordinary rapport with the individual components that make up the wholeness of a large landscape.”

The painting comprises an array of sumptuous blues and yellows, the sweeping brush strokes illustrative of Hitchens’ desire to provide the viewer with an all-encompassing experience and feeling of nature, limited not by the mere representation of a scene. Although undeniably requiring subjective interpretation in its abstract nature, ‘Late Summer Distance’ exemplifies Hitchens’s tendency throughout his oeuvre to “place before us only those forms that interest and please him.”

This work has been in the collection of the Poindexter family since the 60s when Elinor Poindexter gave Hichens a solo show at her prestigious gallery in Madison Avenue, New York.