For an artist renowned as a supreme colourist, the small group of monochrome works that John Hubbard painted between 1958 and 1965 are bold, dramatic and revelatory. The additional surprise is that they are landscapes. They feature the vigorous brushstrokes and the striking compositions that we most associate with Hubbard’s portrayal of natural phenomena, along with a characteristic spontaneity and energy. All that is removed is colour, though that only makes them more compelling.

The genesis of these black and white paintings is to be found in Hubbard’s initial training in Abstract Expressionism in his native USA and his sympathies with the likes of Jackson Pollock, Motherwell, Brooks and Kline. They are redolent of an artist in transition, finding a compromise between hard-edged abstraction and representation, as he forged his own way. There is a distinct graphic quality found in early paintings such as Coaster that link to Hubbard’s affinity with the calligraphic art of East Asia. In his text for Hubbard’s exhibition at the Warwick Arts Trust (1981), Bryan Robertson recounts how Hubbard was posted to Japan where he stayed until 1956. “At Harvard he had also studied Japanese and Chinese painting, gardens and architecture, but was equally absorbed by the relationship between work and life in Japan, and by landscape or bird or flower painting in black and white. In Chinese art this is the area which also interested Hubbard the most; and as a whole, he prefers Chinese to Japanese art.” Indeed, Hubbard also noted that he liked the “Chinese idea of allowing a subject to absorb you... and then be assayed in a spontaneous, animated way, so as to preserve a sense of life.” Hubbard’s black and white paintings certainly do that. They enthral now, just as they did when they were first painted.