Beyond his great importance to twentieth century British painting, Ivon Hitchens holds added significance for Gladwell & Patterson for the influence he would have on one our leading painters, Kenneth Webb. Webb has admired the work of Ivon Hitchens since the early years of his studies and his influence can be seen throughout the younger artist’s work, particularly his Field Poppies and Myths and Legends series. The two first met at Hitchens’ 80th birthday in 1973, where they formed an immediate friendship. Both artists would often meet and share their technical experience and insights. Thus, while Hitchens was a significant visual source of Webb’s aesthetics, it would be the younger artist who introduced Hitchens to the experimental effects which could be achieved through the use of acrylic paints.

Sitting in a liminal space between the binary of abstract and figurative painting, both artists applied elements of these two stylistic poles in their respective quests to capture their immediate surroundings and create a new form of expressive landscape. As the critic Patrick Heron put it in the mid-1950s ‘Hitchens in West Sussex provides the most distinguished example of profound personal identification of a painter with a special place or landscape’. While Hitchens may have moved close to abstraction, his immersion in his beloved West Sussex environment would always ground his work in a very real topography. The close perspectives and solid planes of colour found in his landscapes evoke the sense of an artist submerged in the woods and ponds around his Petworth home. It is this attachment to their surroundings that most clearly unites Kenneth and Ivon.

It is therefore of particular significance that both the present works, April Haze no. 3 and Wildflower Wood, have been a part of Kenneth Webb’s personal collection. As such they not only symbolise the shared artistic development of the two artists, but offer a physical reminder of how the journey of artworks between collections can serve to add greater meaning to the paintings themselves. That Kenneth Webb, one of Hitchens’ greatest admirers, choose these two examples of the older artist’s works is the clearest testimony as to their importance as paradigms of his style.