For more than 40 years, Rose Hilton (1931-2019) looked out from her cliffside home in Cornwall over ocean and sky, and the moors growing wild with heather. With oil paint, brushes and a rag, she swept these untamed surroundings into abstract patterns, rhythmic lines and blocks of glorious color. Against a hot pink ground, turquoise shapes dance alongside marks of mustard and maroon in Botallack Landscape, from 2009, which she painted at the age of 78. Her 2012 work, Journey, envelops viewers in a panorama of craggy orange and yellow forms, which shimmer against a flesh-colored sea.
These joyful compositions were among 37 previously unseen works on display in a recent exhibition, “Rose Hilton: works from the studio,” at David Messum Fine Art in London. Singing boldly, they showed an artist inventing new pictorial space with a creative freedom she enjoyed only later in life.
As a young woman, Rose’s strict, religious family tried to ban her from pursuing an artistic career. After applying to the Royal College of Art in secret, she accepted a scholarship that let her study from 1954 to 1957. Having left her disapproving parents behind, Rose met and fell for a rising star of the British art scene, Roger Hilton, who became her husband in 1965. For 17 years, Rose’s freedom was curtailed by Roger; 20 years older, he established unjust rules for their relationship, as she remembered in one interview: “We’d been together for a little while and one day Roger said to me, ‘It’s working, you and I, but I’m the painter in this set-up—and don’t forget it.’ That was the way it was. He was the artist. I was the wife and mother.”
In the mornings, Rose would wake to find Roger’s written instructions for domestic duties, which she juggled with the care of their two sons. A functioning alcoholic, with a bottle of whisky permanently positioned on the table in his studio, Roger required Rose to hold him, and their family, together. As has been the case for countless male artists, he couldn’t have succeeded without her domestic labor giving him the time, space and support to work uninterrupted.
But Rose was painting in secret whenever she could find the time. She’d discovered in their house a small and empty glass conservatory on the mezzanine, which became a hidden store for her materials and paintings. There, she would work for as long as possible, from just a few minutes to a couple of hours a day, often making small studies of herself in domestic settings—a subject she would never abandon.
One evening, returning home from the pub, Roger confronted Rose: “I know you’ve been at it, I can smell the turps.” After insisting that she show him the work, he gave her some tips. “I believed I had something to offer, and Roger believed this also, as he said: ‘You will have to work hard to bring this out.’” Gradually, Rose asserted herself more, and in the last few years of Roger’s life, particularly as he became bedridden due to chronic alcoholism, Rose would paint in a small corner of his studio, crediting him as “a big influence on the development of my work and my attitude to color.”
Nevertheless, as primarily a wife and mother, Rose was very much an artist in suspension. It was only after Roger died in 1975 that she was able to paint daily and with greater liberty. A particularly confident canvas from this period, Blue Studio Nude, 1975, portrays a woman faced away from the viewer and treading into a pool of blue shadows, which are echoed rhythmically in a bowl positioned to her side. It’s among several works in the exhibition that demonstrate how equally skilled Rose was at drawing and handling color. As a student at the Royal College of Art, where her peers included Pauline Boty, Bridget Riley and Peter Blake, she’d been awarded both the Life Drawing and Painting prize.
Returning her humanizing, female gaze on the nude figure, Rose worked from friends-turned-models at home. In Sally, 2001, the named sitter appears relaxed as she leans upon a mantelpiece, looking upon her reflection in a square, shiny mirror. The peachy tones of her skin are complemented by the pastel-hued room, where an inviting armchair beckons the viewer to sit rather than stare voyeuristically at its subject.
“Rather than paint models, I prefer to paint my friends, as I know more about their characters and use a particular palette accordingly,” the artist once explained. In Lucy, the artist’s clothed muse sinks into a blue seat by an open window, through which a warm landscape can be seen. It shows Rose balancing figuration on the edge of decoration, embracing the same quality that she admired in the work of French painters Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard and Henri Matisse.
This modernist, pattern-making effect comes to full force in Red Room, c.2010, from which the figure has departed, leaving behind a rouge, square interior punctuated by lozenges of repeating lilac, orange and green, as if hinting at worlds beyond domestic walls. As in Matisse’s The Red Studio, 1911, color itself has become a primary subject for Rose.
Like the French master, whose last chapter was his most prolific and inventive, Rose found expressive force in her final decades. During this period, she developed a unique approach to abstraction, blurring the edges of forms composed with hazy hues to create a soft-focus effect evident in works such as Apollo from 2014: vivid green forms glow within an intense, all-over, red color-soaked composition. In another late abstract work, The Valley, Rose painted a shimmering, almost ghostly pattern of harmonious greens and reds, evoking the sublime light and shade of the valley that lies between St Just and Botallack, where she would walk her dog most days.
While ostensibly a painter of abstracts, Rose continued to work from both figures and the Cornish landscape, as well as making everyday domestic spaces of life into sites of modernism. She also retained a vitality in approach right into her late 80s, as confirmed by her dealer David Messum: “Rose’s paintings reflect her joie de vivre. As she grew and found space for her own work, she developed a style that, whilst figurative, lent towards more abstracted, vibrant, color field paintings. After years of suspension, it was clear that she had a voice of her own distinct from those around her within the St Ives Group.”
The art world fetishizes young, emerging talent, but it was later in life that Rose flourished, reviving her practice that was halted for almost two decades to enjoy critical and commercial success; as early as 1977, she had a solo show at Newlyn Art Gallery, while she lived to see her major retrospective at Tate St Ives in 2008.
She is among a long list of 20th-century women artists, including Lee Miller (whose retrospective opens at London’s Tate Britain this month), being “rediscovered.” In their afterlives, their works are being repositioned and revalued, quite rightfully, beyond the shadow of their more famous male partners.
Rose Hilton, in particular, was a great artist who not only found creative salvation and freedom in painting but also perceived beauty in her everyday surroundings, from the coastline to her conservatory. A superb colorist, she moved modern British art into the next phase of abstraction, for which she must be celebrated.
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