Roger Hilton
Cornish abstraction with a figure fighting its way back in, and gouaches made from a sickbed.
Roger Hilton was born at Northwood in 1911, studied at the Slade and in Paris under Bissiere, and spent much of the war as a prisoner after the Dieppe raid. He was among the first British painters to work in a fully abstract manner in the 1950s, influenced by Mondrian and by his friendship with Constant, then let the figure back in — bodies, boats, animals, drawn with a thick charcoal-like line across flat grounds. He moved to Botallack in Cornwall in 1965. Bedridden and drinking heavily in his final years, he made the Night Letters, hundreds of small gouaches on paper. He won the John Moores Prize and the Venice Biennale UNESCO prize, and died in 1975.
Oils on canvas are the smaller and more valuable part of the output; the gouaches on paper are far more numerous and are collected in their own right rather than as studies. Many works are undated and some are unsigned, and Hilton frequently worked on both sides of a sheet, which raises real questions about framing and presentation. Paper condition is often poor, since much of it was cheap stock used quickly. The estate and the standing literature are the reference for attribution.
If you own a work by Roger Hilton
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