This depicts the back door of Greenleaves, the Sussex home that Hitchens built for his family after being bombed out of London in 1940. The door had become a regular motif in Hitchens’ work by 1972, as had the distinctive use of a wide-format canvas, where guides the viewer across the surface. Hitchens’ concern lay in expressing the experience of a place, rather than creating a mere likeness, ‘my pictures are painted to be “listened” to’ he declared in a 1956 article for the Royal College of Art journal. His later work shows his commitment to ‘visual sound’, becoming brighter in colour and more fractious in form: ‘visual sounds is of first and greatest importance. Without it the picture is useless’.