Roger Hilton
His ‘wild, destructive, gawky imagery… [had added] up to something utterly resolved’.
Roger Hilton wrote three letters to Ruth Borchard. The first, dated 'Dec 20' (presumably 1965), from Botallack Moor, St Just, Cornwall, reads: '... I have quite a good drawing of myself which I could let you have for 21gns. If you are interested please let me know. We have moved to the above, hence the delay.' (Ruth has added the following comment, 'Returned 11/1/66 too creased'.) In his second, undated, letter Hilton writes: 'Thank you for your cheque [apparently for 21 guineas]. The drawing has got slightly creased as you will see but a competent framer should be able to fix it.' In his third letter (dated '8 June', no doubt 1966) by which time the problems of the creased drawing had been sorted out, Hilton writes: 'I'm glad you liked the drawing. I should like to see your collection very much but doubt if I shall be in those parts for some time.'
Roger Hilton was fifty-five years old when he drew this self-portrait. A more dispassionate yet poignantly intimate work of self-scrutiny can hardly be imagined. Here technique and feeling are indivisibly one. Each line is inimitable and plays a uniquely expressive part within the overall composition. The delicate strokes at the top of his balding head perfectly describe his minimal, flyaway hair. The few faint lines furrowing his brow have been drawn with just the right degree of graceful pressure. The chiaroscuro used to suggest the sagging wrinkled area under the chin is sensitively applied, as is the partly mottled line representing the slackening downturn of the mouth. The elegant, orbic precision of the rimmed glasses (one lens accentuated more than the other) part way down the nose, is scrupulously rendered, as are the ingenious staccato dots for the nostril openings.
Without a trace of self-pity or trumped-up pathos, Hilton has made a strong yet subtle appraisal of himself as a slightly dishevelled, somewhat tired-looking middle-aged man. It is a drawing of clear, incisive seeing, whose ultimate effect, far from being dispiriting, is in a way curiously inspiring in its unflinching frankness, and humbling too in its dignified stoicism.
By 1966, when this self-portrait was made, Hilton was suffering from peripheral neuritis and an increasingly uncomfortable skin condition. Alcohol had contributed to this deterioration of health since the mid-1950s, and his work pattern had suffered accordingly. His behaviour then towards family and friends (always marked by a mordant and outrageous sense of humour) had at times become remorselessly and relentlessly critical. In 1957, the artist and art critic Patrick Heron gave this description of Hilton: 'his own wry humour, his thin, tall, slightly round-shouldered figure, his small bird-like head with its small, very sharp, slightly down-turning beak of a nose that pecks its way into anyone's arguments till they resemble torn bits of paper.'
In its honest realism, psychological depth and focus and its unsentimental recognition of human frailties, this drawing can be seen to have affinities with late self-portraits in pastel by the French artist Jean-Siméon Chardin (1699-1779), such as Self-Portrait with Spectacles (1771; Collection: Musée du Louvre), of which Marcel Proust wrote in 1895: 'Above the outsized pair of glasses that have slipped to the end of his nose and are pinching it between two brand new lenses, are his tired eyes with their dulled pupils; the eyes look as if they have seen a lot, laughed a lot, loved a lot, and are saying in tender, boastful fashion: 'Yes, I am old!' Behind the glimmer of sweetness dulled by age they still sparkle.'
Another self-portrait drawing by Hilton of a similar date (c.1966) in pastel has none of the incisive heightened realism of the work acquired by Ruth. In robustly assured yet raw, childlike black lines, it depicts the artist (under an aura or cloud of scribbled yellow ochre) as a figure seemingly untroubled by tremulous doubt, with an abstracted yet still transfixing gaze. In its deliberate faux-naive style, it is kindred in spirit to some of David Hockney early 60s portrait drawings and paintings.
It was around 1958 that Roger first met the painter Rose[mary] Phipps - she become his second wife in July 1965; they had two sons, Bo and Fergus, born in the early 60s. Rose Hilton (1931-2019) has recalled that her 'very first impression was that Roger was formidable. He wasn't a smiley person. He had a powerful gaze that he'd fix you with through his glasses, and you felt he was summing you up [...] If he set out to charm, my goodness he could.'
In an article based on an interview with Rose Hilton (in The Guardian, 19th March 2011) on the occasion of a London exhibition of her new paintings at the age of nearly eighty, Fiona Clampin has written, 'She looks back with great affection on her years with Roger – even when she is recounting some of the difficult moments, she is smiling. "He had a great sense of humour and a kind of honesty that admitted he was difficult. Just as I was thinking, I don't like this kind of life, he would say with huge charm: 'I know I'm a shit, but if you can bear with it ...'. Even the boys come round to remembering the good parts. Children are much tougher than one realises, and they can benefit from having a slightly different life with creative parents."'
An earlier Hilton self-portrait, a drawing of 1946, has a comparable look of unyielding self-analysis conjured up through tautly-drawn features – a small nose and mouth and narrowed eyes peering through horn-rimmed spectacles. His use of line then was as strong as ever; three strong symmetrical furrows on the brow, a few stray lines evoking strands of hair falling over his forehead (he was not balding yet), powerful contours of neck, jaw and head. There is a wry vulnerability here too, an acerbic, defensive look perhaps, but not the degree of suffering so objectively delineated in the self-portrait made twenty years later.
The assured vitality of Hilton's use of line – rooted in his training at the Slade and then his studies in various Parisian ateliers –grew very much out of lived experience; it was never remotely academic. He wrote: 'As you live it changes the line you make. As your life is, so is your line. As you live it becomes more your line. The line says more [...] at first you make many lines, and then you only have to make a few, and they say more.'
Roger Hilton was born in Middlesex in 1911. The art writer John McEwen wrote (in Country Life, 1st August 2016): 'Roger Hilton’s paternal heredity was immigrant Jewish. His family [...] anglicised their Germanic Hildersheim surname in the First World War (when anti-German feeling was widespread). His father was a GP, his mother [Louisa Sampson] a former Slade student who noted that, at four, he observed ‘things keenly’ and drew ‘with great spirit’. Hilton studied at the Slade School of Fine Art from 1929-31 under the formidable figure of Professor Henry Tonks, and made fine line drawings there, whose subtle, purposeful contours and superimposed cross-hatching were inspired by Renaissance drawing. A Hilton self-portrait pencil drawing (c.1931), made in a notebook, shows smooth features and waves of hair adroitly delineated; the look here is serious and purposeful, and the dark eyes through large horn-rimmed glasses, are at once fiercely penetrating and abstracted. An early 1930s conté crayon portrait of his brother John Hilton, gazing downwards, shows a sharper use of modelling, based on sleek arcs and soft shading. In January 1936, he had his first one-man exhibition, at the Bloomsbury Gallery in London, which was reviewed by Anthony Blunt, the art historian, who noted Hilton's 'tendency [...] to give full play to [...] restrained and delicate colour-harmonies and to a considerable ability in a rather swaggering use of paint'.
Hilton spent long periods living in Paris during the 1930s, and his Esquisse Album H, a sketchbook made during subsequent visits to Paris (c.1946-47), displays a more spontaneous, eclectically influenced draughtsmanship: a portrait, for example, of a young girl in a frilly collar – that detail evoked by a marvellously succinct squiggly line – showing Matisse's influence.
Roger's first wife Ruth (née David) recalled that she first met him in 1938: 'I found him an unusual, amiable, amusing young man with an extraordinary voice. Seemed already world-weary, detached.' Serving as a commando during the Second World War – he took part in December 1941 in the successful amphibious attack by the three combined British armed forces on an island off the Norwegian coast – he was taken prisoner-of-war in 1942. During an early period spent in Stalag 8B, Silesia, he found himself, as he said in a letter, 'disconcertingly well-fed and comfortable'. However, in mid-1944, he and other inmates had to endure a gruelling forced march from Silesia to Bavaria. A friend later remarked, 'He was not upset by fearful experiences, didn't worry about physical hardship, and was extremely brave – a sort of ridiculous bravado sometimes – in the face of danger. Many died of hunger, cold or the brutality of the guards. "I was always a good walker," he once said to me. "We used to sing – a good thing, that – kept the spirits up."' John McEwen noted that 'Hilton’s architect brother John wrote: “He combined great emotional vulnerability with a hardiness that I could nowhere near match.” It equipped him well for art and war. He distinguished himself as a commando, was captured in the Dieppe raid and survived a two-month-long forced march before his liberation in May 1945'. Hilton's experience of life in extremis towards the end of the war decisively changed him, forcing him to grow up, and reconsider his direction as a serious artist.
In his monograph Roger Hilton: The Figured Language of Thought (Lund Humphries, London, 2007), Andrew Lambirth wrote: 'As he was himself to note succinctly, 'On return, life seen as gratuitous gift' [His first wife] Ruth [whom Roger married in 1947; they had a son Matt (b.1948, an artist now best known as a printmaker) and a daughter Rose; their marriage ended in 1963] thought there was no great war trauma hidden deep in Hilton, but [his second wife, the painter] Rose [Hilton] remembers that “Roger spoke of big French-Canadian soldiers dropping from fatigue, some even dying, on the long march through Germany. He said the wiry ones, the thinner ones – presumably himself among them – survived better." [Such] memories formed part of the baggage that postwar Hilton had to shoulder. To begin with, the unaccustomed weight made him stagger.'
Like his contemporary, William Gear (q.v.), who also spent periods in post-war Paris, Hilton was gravitating by the late 40s towards abstract painting, similarly based on tightly meshed, architectonic grid forms, palpitating with pungent flashes of primary colour. Yet he continued to make fine figurative drawings, including tender mother and baby studies, and also of his first wife Ruth asleep. In fact, he reacted against pure abstraction in his art, saying, 'For an abstract painter there are two ways out or in: he must give up painting and take to architecture, or he must re-invent figuration.' In 1952, he met and then became close to the painter and critic Patrick Heron (1920-1999), who was greatly impressed by Hilton's art and went on to write most articulately about it.. At around this time he re-encountered the painter William Scott (1913-1989), whom he had known as a fellow student. Lambirth notes that 'Scott was to become a close rival, a deeply distinguished painter who earned Hilton's admiration and whose indirect influence he was wary of [...] Further friendships developed, though given Hilton's temperament, not always smoothly. Hilton met [the painters] Peter Lanyon [1918-1964] and Bryan Wynter [1915-1975] about this time.'
In 1952 he had his first solo exhibition at Gimpel Fils in London. Following a first visit to St Ives in Cornwall in 1956, Hilton spent long periods there and in Newlyn. Lambirth records: '”I don't think Roger loved Cornwall,” comments his second wife, Rose, “he didn't like being classed as a Cornish Painter” [...] But she thinks that he did actually like the Cornish landscapes, “I remember him saying on a walk, ‘Thank God I can enjoy it without thinking how to paint it.’” Rose thinks he painted it by osmosis, a view Hilton's first wife shared. To Ruth's eye, “his painting naturally absorbed the colours and shapes around him.”'
Hilton wrote in 1956 with characteristic mischievous wit: 'It is disconcerting not knowing whether my next show will be of chaste abstracts or violent figuration but in any case it will be one or the other'. His wildly gesticulated paintings of the late 1950s – made with brush and knife often in resonant, earthy colours, overlaid with defining charcoal lines – sometimes contain intuitively symbolic boat-like shapes; such pictures suggest a lurching concatenation of elemental forces – of sea, wind, and inner maelstroms too. Reviewing Hilton's February 1958 Retrospective at London's ICA, Patrick Heron wrote that 'The explosive expressionism of his ragged and sometimes brutal symbols is utterly tamed by the purely pictorial realities of his extremely varied colour and his sense of balance – in a word, by his knowledge of, and reverence for, the art of painting.'
By the early 1960s, what Patrick Heron had called Hilton's 'wild, destructive, gawky imagery [...] subjected to the discipline of fine painting' had triumphed: here were leaping women (seen in the Dionysiac Dancing Woman (1963; Collection: Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh), of which the British politician and one-time Chairman of the Arts Council of England, Lord Gowrie wrote (in Country Life, 1stAugust 2016): 'I never met Roger Hilton, but his widow, Rose, a magnificent painter herself, now in her eighties, is a friend. She told me she made the mistake of losing her temper with Roger– easy to do – while in the nude. The result was this balletic joy, as if Matisse had gone to work on a lavatory wall.') and predatory birds, exhilaratingly naïve in form, adding up to [in Heron's words] ‘something formally immaculate and complete’.'
In 1954 Hilton had written:
I have a taste for plain pictures. I like my colours dynamic and strongly contrasted [...]
The more alive a person is or a picture, the better they are. Any picture which does not give an immediate sensation of vitality is a dead picture.
By 1966, when Hilton made his self-portrait drawing, his health had deteriorated considerably yet he continued to make work (intermittently though) that was tremendously alive, perhaps more alive than ever. In October 1972, he was confined to bed, painfully disabled because of his peripheral neuritis. Over the next two years at his cottage in Cornwall’s West Penwith, sustained mainly by whisky and cigarettes and forced for the first time to use his right hand, he made over a thousand vibrant so-called gouaches (actually using children's poster painters, whose pigment is coarser and thicker than that of gouache) and illustrated messages to his long-suffering wife Rose. These are full of absurd, sometimes cantankerous humour and a characteristic bravado in the face of appalling conditions, recording what has been described as 'his thoughts on art, his imminent death, the irritations and pleasures of daily life, and his often controversial assessments of colleagues and contemporaries'. Of such works made with what Lambirth has called 'That shambling yet cursive line of Hilton's [...] operating with the sort of haptic conviction usually reserved for sculpture', the artist himself ruminated: 'Never rub out or attempt to erase; work round it if you have made a mistake. Make of your mistakes a strength rather than a weakness. As in life, it is not what you put in, but what you leave out that counts. Most pictures can be pulled round. If you run into head-winds, tear it up.'
Andrew Lambirth quotes Rose Hilton's recollection: 'He didn't think he would make a Grand Old Man of painting. I think he was aware he wouldn't live into old age. He said the march across Germany had taken 10 years off his life. He was ruefully envious of Terry's [Terry Frost's] robustness [Frost (1915-2003), who himself had served as a commando during the War, had been interned as a prisoner-of-war in Stalag 383 in Bavaria in 1941, where he felt 'a spiritual awakening […] a heightened perception during starvation', and where he had met the painter Adrian Heath who encouraged his artist's calling]. I don't think temperamentally [Roger] was suited to old age, even though he may have had some more paintings in him.' Roger Hilton died in 1975.
In Hilton's final outrageously improvised, consummately gawky, life-affirmative studies with their hallucinatory yet impeccable colours – portraying a fertile private mythology of seated figures and nudes, birds, tigers, dogs, horses and carts, spoke-wheeled vehicles and boats and etc. amid gorgeous 'scenery' – the eternal struggle between figuration and abstraction, between the studied and the spontaneous line, was transcended, and miraculously resolved.
- Text by Philip Vann, updated and revised from the first edition of Face to Face: British Self-Portraits in the Twentieth Century, 2004