Rose Hilton, 1931 - 2019

Without doubt, Rose Hilton is a fascinating artist and one whose art possesses a sense of warmth, light and energy which pervades everything she produced. As James Russell, art historian, reported in the foreward to Messum’s 2018 exhibition of Hilton’s work, in 1983 Rose Hilton wrote in her diary that, ‘I have always … wished my works to have the lightness and joyousness of a springtime which never let anyone suspect the labours it costs.’

This wish to hide the laboriousness involved in making a painting - the planning and processing, trying to clarify and communicate one’s experience - is not new or unique. One finds the same ambition expressed by many artists: for me, James McNeill Whistler, in his 1878 court case against the critic Ruskin, who had accused the American artist of ‘cockney impudence’ in, ‘flinging a pot of paint into the public’s face’, might have come up with one of the most pithy rejections of the idea that the effort of painting ought to be manifest in the production. Challenged in court about his ability to, ‘knock off’ his pictures, Whistler replied that his art was valuable, because it was informed by, ‘the knowledge I have gained in the work of a lifetime.’ And that is what one can see in Rose Hilton’s work. It is the expression of someone who has been thinking about and learning about her art for a lifetime. And she had quite a lifetime.

She was born Rosemary Phipps in rural Kent, in the middle of a family of eight children, whose parents were Plymouth Brethren. This particular Non-Conformist set of beliefs demanded that: women were subject to the wishes of their husbands; in church, they must cover their heads and should remain silent; their role should be to bear children and make a home; their reward will come from their husbands and from God. This may well have helped to shape Rose Hilton’s adult life and not always for the best; but, for a child, it seems to have created a home which offered a life of security and happiness. And this thread of happiness infuses all of her art.

In 1946, Hilton started her art training at Beckenham School of Art. The teaching focused on a wide range of skills, perhaps with a view to working as a designer, craftsperson or illustrator (staff included Principal, Jack Cole, a potter, and accomplished designer, Robin Day). It is said that Rose Hilton feigned an interest in teacher training, so that her parents would accede to her desire to go to college. To me, the plan to become an art teacher seems a perfectly reasonable ambition, and not simply a device to persuade her parents of the practical and moral value of this education. It may well be that, after Beckenham, the prospect of the RCA was, for Hilton’s parents, more threatening: and, indeed, the early-mid 1950s witnessed an explosion of radical artistic and social ideas which must have startled not only her parents, but the artist herself. Amongst her teachers were Rodrigo Moynihan, Carel Weight, Roger de Grey, John Minton, Ruskin Spear and Robert Buhler. Amongst her fellow students were Peter Blake, Joe Tilson, Richard Smith, Robyn Denny and Bridget Riley. It is hard to overemphasise how great the impact of these challenging years must have been on a young, female, aspiring artist, brought up in a staunchly Non-Conformist family and educated, thus far, in a reassuringly traditional environment. And the artist herself admitted that,

‘When I arrived at the Royal College of Art in 1953 it was a traumatic experience. I had come from a Plymouth Brethren family. We had Bible reading after breakfast, so the change was such a shock that my body couldn’t take it. In the summer of 1954 I got tuberculosis and was sent to a sanatorium. I spent the whole year reading and returned to the RCA the following summer.’ [i]

It seems, however, that a year of quiet contemplation served Rose Hilton well. She returned to the RCA and - although she later felt that she, ‘didn’t really learn much from the tutors there’, because the teaching ‘was all about tonal painting’ - she was successful, winning prizes, including an Abbey Minor Scholarship to study in Rome in 1958[2]. The British School in Rome had been founded in 1901, on the premise that much could be learned from studying the history and archaeology of Classical Antique art and architecture, as well as works from the Renaissance – and, whilst this must be true (despite the questioning of the value of this heritage, which had certainly found its voice by the 1950s), this was also the first time when Hilton had the opportunity to mix with artists from several different Western countries, especially America, and the first time abroad, amidst the colour and light of Italy. After the sensual deprivation of her rather narrow upbringing during the War years and time thereafter in the grey and only slowly-recovering city of London, this must have been an exhilarating time. And, with these rewarding months behind her, in 1959, back in London, she started teaching at Sidcup Art School. And then she met and fell in love with the artist, Roger Hilton.

Roger Hilton, in the later 1950s, was moving from figuration towards abstraction; in his exhibition at the Gimpel Fils Gallery in 1956, he described his style as, ‘semi-figurative abstraction’. It was in this same year, however, that he was looking to make changes: he wanted to leave Gimpel Fils, which he saw as trying to direct the development of his art; his first marriage was failing; 1956 saw him leaving London for the summer and spending the first of what turned out to be many years in Cornwall, where he rented a studio in St. Ives, already a long-established, thriving artistic community (in the 1950s and ‘60s including Peter Lanyon, Bryan Winter and Patrick Heron); also, 1958 saw his successful first retrospective at the ICA, followed by purchases of his paintings for the nation. Thus, when, in 1959, Rose met Roger, he must have been an exciting - and challenging - companion. The two of them spent their first summer together in Cornwall. One can imagine that the turbulent Roger Hilton, ‘alcoholic and controlling’, committed to his art and full of ambitions and new ideas, must have offered to the younger artist a cause which could have seemed as challenging and fulfilling as her childhood Non-Conformism. No wonder, then, that, many years later, Rose Hilton would acknowledge that she, ‘transferred the whole of her passion for religion onto painting’.

In later years, however, Rose Hilton did not try to hide the fact that, once married to Roger Hilton, from 1965 living permanently in Botallack in Cornwall, and looking after their two sons, she was very rarely able to get on with her painting. Roger made no bones about it:

‘Roger had said: “If you are going to be with me, then I’m going to be the painter.” By that time I was in love with him, so I thought that was my destiny…. There were quiet times when he was in his studio, or sleeping, or out … when I would do some painting.’

It is, in some ways, reassuring to find that Rose Hilton does not seem to have found her husband’s bullying attitude too difficult to manage. Of course, she was busy with young children and domestic duties. And her husband seems to have been someone who required quite a lot of looking after. What is more, she apparently realised that, being younger and taller than him, she was able to resist physical threats. She obviously valued life with her husband, admired his art and enjoyed being the, ‘lissome female figure .. (who) danced through his art’ in his later years. One ought, perhaps, to keep at the back of one’s mind that the pattern of her life may also have had a degree of comforting familiarity about it, given her upbringing. Moreover, in time, she benefited from her husband’s artistic advice: when Roger did discover that she was still painting - largely when he was elsewhere - he invited her to show her work to him and would offer what she regarded as helpful direction. In particular, he seems to have reminded her of the value of French painting, particularly the Post-Impressionist emphasis on colour; accordingly, Rose developed a great interest in the joyous work of Henri Matisse, Pierre Bonnard and Raoul Dufy.

When Roger Hilton died in 1975, Rose was still in her mid-40s. The shock of losing him, especially after having spent several years caring for him as he became increasingly bedridden, must have been profound. But, gradually, Rose Hilton returned to her art. She went about this with deliberation. She spent time in London, attending drawing classes at the Central School of Art offered by the unconventional and brilliant Cecil Collins. A deeply spiritual man, a visionary (often compared to William Blake), his teaching demanded constant attention: engagement of the mind and the body; spontaneously requiring that the students should move about, echoing the poses of the model; working creatively, with a spirit of joy and awe. In many ways, Collins must have offered a way of thinking about her art which was perfectly suited to Rose Hilton. So much of this sense of exultation seems to be reflected in her later work that one has to be grateful that she should have found such a teacher.

In 1987, David Messum was travelling through Cornwall, with a view to finding good artists for his ‘stable’ and he met Rose Hilton. He was excited by her art and, in 1989, Messum’s staged the first of several exhibitions of her work – her success culminating in a retrospective at the Tate in 2008. Each of these exhibitions was full of scintillating pieces, but the Tate show was remarkable, in that it included work from the past fifty years as well as pictures by other artists selected by Rose Hilton – Cecil Collins, Ivon Hitchens, Mary Potter, Ben and Winifred Nicholson, Bonnard and Matisse. In the catalogues of the several exhibitions Messum’s have held over the years, one can find illustrated a wonderfully rich array of drawings and paintings. These are works explosive with colour and delight; they have their roots in figuration, but with an abstract command of colour and form. What is particularly fascinating is that one can see that the ‘tonal painting’, which Hilton felt was the stuff of the teaching at the RCA, is here combined with a brilliantly sophisticated and excited command of colour. Her subtle rendering of the dominant colour scale of a picture accompanied by a dense chorus of related hues lends her works a ceremonial, musical quality. Ian Collins, the author of a highly informative and incisive study of her life and work, published in 2016, rightly declared that Rose Hilton was, ‘one of the last survivors of the glory days of St Ives modernism’. Above all, she succeeded in expressing the, ‘lightness and joyousness of a springtime’.

© Dr. Hilary Taylor, 2025

[1] ‘Rose Hilton talks about her selection of works for her exhibition at Tate St Ives’, 1 January 2008, Colour Fields, In the Studio,www.tate.org.uk/tate-etc/issue-12-spring-2008/colour-fields

[2] The Abbey Memorial Scholarships were founded by Gertrude Abbey in 1926, in memory of her husband, American artist, Edwin Austin Abbey. Scholars spent time working in the studios at the British School in Rome.