Born on the 3rd of March 1893, Ivon Hitchens was the son of landscape artist Alfred Hitchens, and studied at St John’s Wood School of Art and the Royal Academy Schools in London during the First World War. In 1922 he became the founding member of the Seven and Five Society, and the same year had his first one-man show exhibition at The Mayer Gallery in London. In the 1920’s and 30’s he lived in a studio in Hampstead, within a circle of avant-garde artists known as The London Group, which included Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, Naum Gabo, Paul Nash and Ben Nicholson. Hitchens and his wife Mollie left London for Sussex in 1940 after a bomb landed next door to his studio.

For the next forty years, Hitchen’s six acres of woodland near Midhurst became his home, place of study and constant source of inspiration. In 1955 Patrick Heron wrote Hitchen’s first monograph and the following year The British Council arranged a retrospective exhibition of his work for the Venice Biennale. Ivon Hitchens died in August 1979.