Estate of the artist
Waddington Galleries, London, whence acquired by the present owner in the late 1990s
Private Collection, UK

Plymouth, Museum and Art Gallery, Three Masters of Modern British Painting, June - October 1961, cat. no.8, with Arts Council tour to Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield, Temple Newsam House, Leeds, City Art Gallery, Manchester and Art Gallery and Museum, Cheltenham;
London, Tate, Ivon Hitchens: A Retrospective Exhibition, 11 July -20 October 1963, cat. no.76, illustrated in the catalogue, with tour to Bradford City Art Gallery, Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery;
Southampton, Civic Art Gallery, University of Southampton Arts Festival, 29 February - 22 March 1964, cat. no.3;
Worthing, Art Gallery, 7 May - 4 June 1966, cat. no.2;
London, Waddington Galleries, Ivon Hitchens, 3 March - 3 April 1993 (centenary of artist's birth),🍒 cat. no.23.  

Alan Bowness, Ivon Hitchens, Lund Humphries, London, 1973, cat. no.31, illustrated;
Peter Khoroche, Ivon Hitchens, Andre Deutsch, London, 1990, cat. no.40, illustrated;
Peter Khoroche, Ivon Hitchens, Lund Humphries, Aldershot, 2007, cat.no.93, pp.120-21 and 127, illustrated on the front cover and p.124. 

There are pinholes in each corner and one in the centre along the upper edge of the canvas. The canvas appears to be in good original condition. The paint surface is in good overall condition. Examination under ultra-violet light reveals small areas of fluorescence in each corner and in the centre of the upper and lower edges. This appears to be retouching. There is also some slight fluorescence beneath the signature which represents an area which has been left when the rest of the painting was cleaned. Held behind glass in a painted rectilinear frame. Please telephone the department on 020 7293 5381 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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The present work will be familiar to many as it appears on the front cover of Peter Khoroche's updated edition of his seminal monograph on the artist, Ivon Hitchens, first published in 1990. Not only does Khoroche mark the great importance of Dark and Light Trees in Hitchens' oeuvre by illustrating it on the cover, but he discusses it within the text to explore Hitchens' impressive versatility as an artist. The first aspect Khoroche draws attention to is the importance of the areas of primed white canvas between the areas of colour. The blocks of colour in Dark and Light Trees are predominantly pure and saturated, particularly in the centre and to the right of the composition, and the areas of primed canvas separate the blocks of colour. Khoroche quotes Hitchens' thoughts on the subject, 'the white areas or lines of white canvas... are to provide channels isolating the areas of paint so that these can be felt relatively to each other in their shape, area, weight and meaning, one to another, in colour opposition, or gradation, movement of hue, or temperature, i.e. warm to cool (or vice versa), light to dark (or vice versa), or just echo to echo. The intention is that the spectator's eye can travel along these areas 'from f🐷loe to floe', over the picture surface instead of being e🐽ngulfed or drowned in a morass of paint representing or aping realism.'

Khoroche also discusses the presentation of expressive paint against a white primed background in Dark and Light Trees to consider the influence of the painting of the Far East on Hitchens' artistic practice. 'Together with the calligraphic brush marks and the swift, alla prima execution, the large areas of white will surely bring to mind the landscape painting of the Far East, where the blank space in a picture is something that balances forms and masses – a positive not a negative factor – giving also a sense of infinity; where drawing and painting are not separate activities but interfused; where the brush strokes,🤡 expressive in themselves, are part of the pictorial design; and where the first and fundamental law (laid down by Hsieh Ho in the sixth century and recognised ever since) is that of rhythmic vitality.' (Khoroche, op.cit., 2007, pp.120-121).