Roger Hilton 1911-1975

Private Collection, Malaysia
Osborne Samuel, London

Hilton’s bouts of drinking and associated ill health seriously impacted his output in later years, when he found it difficult to sustain the discipline of working. The paintings he did complete – although sometimes uneven – were, however, able to draw upon the experience of maturity. Hilton had won the John Moores Painting Prize in 1963, represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1964, and in 1969 (the year after he received a CBE) his work was included in the British Council’s survey of ‘Contemporary British Painting’, which toured South Africa.

Among ideas from earlier decades that recur in Hilton’s paintings is a fluid outline suggesting a head, seen to the lower left in Untitled (1968). The motif has no fixed location, appearing sometimes at the top of a canvas, sometimes at the bottom, and from various angles – straight-on, skewed or oblique. Often it is combined with a horizontal line, which implies the contour of a landscape or a reclining figure. Given Hilton’s proclivity for transforming and abstracting from the human form, the temptation is to interpret the umber silhouette in Untitled (1968) as the shadow from a viewer’s head, cast across the legs and lower torso of a reclining nude. Yet the reference is ambiguous, the painting’s ochre and chalk palette suggesting equally a parched landscape. Focusing more closely, it is the quality of line that proves seductive. The charcoal line emanating from the right – perhaps separating hills, or legs – is disrupted by a disc more opaque than the surrounding ground. The line, too, falters. Through this stutter, or vibration, a compelling relationship is established between the implied viewer, the disc, and the empty looped circle echoed above.

Private Collection
Osborne Samuel Gallery

In 1965, at the height of his career, Hilton dismantled his London studio and moved to Cornwall, where he had painted since the 1950s. His new studio was in a cottage in Botallack, on the first floor overlooking the moors. It was there that he would paint Untitled (1971), now in the collection of the Tate. That same year, 1971, the Waddington Galleries presented Hilton’s sixth solo exhibition of paintings and drawings. Norbert Lynton, reviewing the exhibition, noted a dazzling variety among the works, some apparently referential, others abstract, a ‘gamut of possible marks and splotches, lines, colours’. The common denominator was freshness: ‘Each [painting] is driven home and left to its own devices, sufficient and vibrant, unpropped by theory or process’.₁ 

Although Hilton painted less and less during these later years, as his health declined, he did so with intensity. His work continued to walk a tightrope between figuration and abstraction, with curves suggesting breasts or hills, hard lines the outline of a house or a table’s edge. This allusiveness had been noted as early as 1958, in terms of landscape, but it was not until 1974 that there was critical acknowledgement of ‘a streak of the erotic’ in Hilton’s painting.₂ In Untitled (1970) there is an ambiguous interplay between landscape and the figure. The painting’s tonality suggests warm earth colours, including a strangely defined vegetal form, but the delineation, through drawing, evokes human contours.

₁ Norbert Lynton, ‘Waddington Galleries, London’, Studio International (November 1971), p. 195–6.
₂ Michael Shepherd, ‘Streak of the Erotic’, Sunday Telegraph (17 March 1974).