Spring Morning

George Hitchcock studied law at Harvard and was a practicing lawyer when he gave it up, at age twenty-nine, to pursue his interest in art. He traveled to Paris where he studied at the Académie Julian under Gustave Boulanger and Jules Joseph Lefebvre. The following year he moved to the Netherlands where he established a studio and began his “Art Summer School.” This would become his permanent home.Though Hitchcock’s early works were large-scale religious paintings in which biblical subjects are garbed in contemporary peasant dress, he later turned to more brilliantly colorful, sunlit paintings of Dutch tulips, usually with a group of figures shown amid the vibrant floral display. Here, the lone figure of a girl punctuates the layers of flowers; the high horizon of the tree line and the overall flatness of the composition indicate his awareness of Japanese perspective. Though less well known today, during his lifetime Hitchcock was regarded in Europe and America as a leading painter of the period.