ROGER HILTON (1911-1975)

By the 1950s, Roger Hilton’s place among the pioneers of abstract art in Britain had led him to seek out the artists of St Ives in Cornwall where he lived and painted increasingly after studying and teaching at the Central School of Art. He held his first Retrospective at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1958.

In 1959, the year in which Hilton painted the present work, he won the John Moores prize, and began to consistently title his paintings with the date of execution as if to catalogue the development of his abstraction and innovation. The use of limited colour and the abstracted human shapes in this composition are characteristic of this important period in the Hilton’s output, just as his reputation as one of the great avant-garde British painters would be recognised on the international stage.