The Painters' Painter

‘Give me the cheque, you look like a decaying oyster’ — thus Roger Hilton accepting the John Moores First Prize in 1963, at the height of his career. At the dinner afterwards, very drunk, he was so rude to an alderman sitting next to him that the poor man had a heart attack and died at the table. It beats Tracey Emin’s ‘I want my mum’ by a country mile, and, although for British artists in recent years the reverse may have seemed to be the case, Andrew Lambirth believes that Hilton’s standing as a painter has been affected by such outrageous episodes, there being ‘a lingering belief in the art establishment in Britain that no artist who could behave so badly could actually be the real thing as a painter’.

Perhaps it accounts for the surprising fact that this is the first major study to be published of the life and work of a much loved and extremely influential artist. In his concluding chapter Lambirth considers the reasons why Hilton has not received the critical attention he deserves: his work was too various; his career (interrupted by the war: in spite of poor sight, a chronic skin condition and varicose veins he was a Commando, captured in the Dieppe Raid) too short; he was too awkward a customer and his reputation in Britain has remained ‘under a polite cloud’. Also, though he admired American art in the 1950s, he was, as his Times obituary noted, ‘perhaps the last major artist to be entirely free of American influences’.