Derek Hill (1916–2000), writes Bruce Arnold, was an English representational landscape and portrait painter of ‘haunting and evocative creative spirituality that is perhaps indefinable’.
Derek Hill (1916–2000), writes Bruce Arnold, was an English representational landscape and portrait painter of ‘haunting and evocative creative spirituality that is perhaps indefinable’. But the biographer was undeterred. As an English author of books on the arts and the chief arts critic of the Irish Independent, he was a friend of Hill’s for the last 37 years of his life.
With access to 40,000 letters and other papers in the artist’s archive and to innumerable other sources of revealing evidence, Arnold has probably come as close as possible to defining an extraordinarily busy artistic and social career. His final judgment is that in spite of some personal flaws (the most notable being self-obsession and gluttony) it was successful.
Hill was a complex character, as Brian Sewell demonstrates in his foreword:
He was very much of the old establishment, the ubiquitous and often noisy presence at the lordly dinner, ownership of his paintings a mark of privilege and proof of aristocracy.
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