Roger Hilton 1911-1975
Untitled, 1973, 1973
gouache on paper
21¾ x 14¾ ins




Though painted towards the end of Hilton’s life when he was confined to bed through ill-health, this exuberant gouache of a jug filled with flowers shows absolutely no sign that his painting was losing any of the vitality and edginess of touch that make him one of the most considerable painters in mid-20th centur British art. Art for Hilton was, above all, an affair of 'instinct and intuition', the distinctions between abstraction and figuration meaningless, the intensity of the feeling a painting conveys always being paramount. Hilton was never capable of making a dull work; writing the same year (1973) to the editor Peter Townsend he observed 'You have to be pretty witty with poster paints if they are not to become inert; the new paintings are almost pointillist in their complexity to overcome the natural inertia of poster paints. I have reached a stage now of simplifying'.