Whooshing seedlings and squabbling stems: Ivon Hitchens at Pallant House reviewed

Set down the secateurs, silence the strimmers. Let it grow, let it grow, let it grow. Ivon Hitchens was a painter of hedgerow and undergrowth, bracken and bramble. Whoosh! go his seedlings, sprouting, bolting, demanding repotting. The first Hitchens you see on the wall outside this exhibition at Pallant House is his lithograph ‘Still Life’ (1938). A squabble of stems break bounds, vault the vase, bid for freedom. I’m a wildflower, get me out of here.

‘I love flowers for painting,’ Hitchens said. ‘Not a carefully arranged bunch such as people ought not to do — but doing a mixed bunch in a natural way.’ If his posies were ever bridal bouquets they have long since been thrown, trampled, sat on by an usher and shoved in an ice bucket to revive.

Ivon Hitchens (1893–1979) was a trier-outer. The early landscapes, such as ‘Didling on the Downs’ (1920s), are irresolute: sort of Seurat, semi-Cézanne.