'January Morning' is a quintessential later Ivon Hitchens landscape painting. Sweeps of pale blue, grey, ochre and green are all laid across the wide-format canvas in loose, rhythmic strokes that shift between solidity and translucence. Hints of trees, water and horizon emerge and dissolve, leaving the viewer immersed in a visual equivalent of morning light filtering through the winter air. This ambiguity, so characteristic of Hitchens’ mature practice, transforms landscape into an experience: not a fixed description but an unfolding perception of colour and space.

Painted in the mid-1960s, 'January Morning' belongs to the long sequence of works created after Hitchens settled permanently at Lavington Common, Sussex. By this point his idiom was fully formed — panoramic compositions in which the horizontal sweep of the countryside is reimagined through fields of colour and layered brush-marks. His palette, which had shifted from earthy greens and browns to brighter, more vivid tones after the 1950s, here conveys the chill clarity of a winter morning while retaining warmth in the ochres and deep greens.

As he explained in 1954: “I seek first to unravel the essential meaning of my subject, which is synonymous with its structure, and to understand my own psychological reactions to it.” This focus on essence and response rather than literal description underpinned the expressive landscapes of his later career.

Born in London in 1893, Hitchens studied at St John’s Wood School of Art and the Royal Academy Schools before becoming a founding member of the Seven & Five Society in 1920. By the late 1930s he had forged the semi-abstract language that would define his career, evolving further in Sussex after 1940. His work is represented in Tate, the Courtauld, and many public collections, with notable private collectors including David Bowie.