'Evening Marshes, Essex' is a classic early landscape by Ivon Hitchens. Its broad sweeps of green, blue, ochre and red are laid down with fluid brushstrokes that cross and overlap, hinting at water, foliage, reflection and sky without ever fixing into literal representation. This ambiguity, central to Hitchens’ approach, encourages the viewer to experience the landscape directly and emotionally rather than through descriptive detail. Having absorbed lessons from Gauguin, Van Gogh and Matisse, Hitchens recognised the expressive rather than mimetic potential of colour. Combined with his increasingly abstract vocabulary, these qualities established him as one of the most daring interpreters of the English countryside.

Works such as 'Evening Marshes', painted in the 1940s, mark a transitional phase before his more panoramic Sussex canvases of the later 1940s and beyond. Here, Hitchens was beginning to move beyond conventional landscape description towards the semi-abstract language that would define his mature career.

As he explained in 1954: “Setting up canvas and box in all weathers, I seek first to unravel the essential meaning of my subject… not by a literal copying of objects but by combinations and juxtapositions of lines, forms, planes, tones, colours… My pictures are to be listened to.”

Born in London in 1893, Hitchens studied at St John’s Wood School of Art and the Royal Academy Schools. In 1920 he became a founding member of the progressive Seven & Five Society, remaining with the group until its closure in 1935. By the late 1930s, he had developed a distinctive style on the threshold between figuration and abstraction. Following the destruction of his London studio in 1940, he settled in Sussex, where his palette brightened and his wide-format canvases evoked the rhythms of the landscape around him. His work is held in Tate, the Courtauld, and numerous other collections, with private collectors including David Bowie.