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. I damned him as a roving painter to nabobs, nobs and snobs. . . .
From more than 60 years of work Derek proved to be, not the dilettante so many thought him, a socialite with a singing-for-his-supper aptitude, but always a consummate professional.
Arnold, with painstaking devotion to detail, traces Derek’s development from the beginning until he became ‘a benevolent, greedy, jolly giant of genius’. He was the youngest of the three sons of Arthur Hill, a wealthy sugar trader who played cricket for England with W.G. Grace. Arthur was an ardent shot and fisherman but tolerated Derek’s preference for aesthetes rather than hearties at Marlborough, and supported him so generously that he never had to earn a living. Richard Buckle, recalling their schooldays together, wrote of Derek’s ‘delicate upswung Modigliani nose, which was much admired by older athletes’. Cecil Beaton found Derek sufficiently good-looking at the age of 17 to photograph him for The Book of Beauty (1930) and inscribed a copy for him with ‘Love from Cecil’. James Lees-Milne later declared in a diary, ‘I have come to love Derek.’
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