Harold Hitchcock was born in 1914 as Raymond Hitchcock in London, into a family of artists, including famed sporting artist, George Stubbs on his mother’s side. Due to his family’s financial problems, Hitchcock was sent to live with his mother’s parents in Thundersley, Essex, where he began to paint at the age of nine. There, he had a vision, he once said, "of harmony and well-being and peace," which influenced him spiritually and artistically thereafter.

By the age of 16, Harold was proclaimed to be an artist-child prodigy by the British press after the artist Laura Knight saw his profound, imaginary landscape paintings. (His parents were both Quakers, and later they introduced Harold to the spiritual movement Subud[1], which later...