Footnotes

Provenance
With Waddington Galleries, London
Mr and Mrs W. Morton
Sale; Sotheby's, London, 4 July 2001, lot 173 (as Composition 1963)
With Godson & Coles, London, 2002, where acquired by the family of the present owners
Private Collection, U.K.

The 1960s ushered in a period of growing critical and commercial acclaim for Hilton. May 1960 saw Hilton's first solo exhibition at Waddington's, with institutional purchases gathering pace: the British Council acquired the first of eleven paintings that they were to buy of his work, with paintings also sold to the Tate, the Arts Council, the Gulbenkian Foundation and the Ferens Art Gallery in Hull. Abroad, travelling exhibitions featured his work, including in the British Council-organised British Painting 1700-1960, which was shown in Moscow and Leningrad, while European Art Today: 35 Painters and Sculptors, organized by the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, travelled to Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York. Clement Greenberg, the most influential art critic of the 20th Century who shaped the reception of modern art in America, was to see this exhibition and write to Hilton praising the 'real character' shown in his paintings, which was quite an accolade from this notoriously hard-to-impress critic (Clement Greenberg quoted in Andrew Lambirth, Roger Hilton: The Figured Language of Thought, Thames & Hudson, London, 2007, p.139). Alan Bowness was a key supporter and not only wrote catalogue introductions which gave serious weight to Hilton's work, but also recommended the purchase of his paintings by public bodies, including the Contemporary Art Society. In November 1963, Hilton was to win first prize in the prestigious John Moores Exhibition in Liverpool, for the painting March 1963.

The present lot, December '63, was painted the month after he won this most fêted prize, and it exhibits all the richness and exuberance that characterises Hilton's best work. With glowing ochre and bold blues, the vibrant colours of this work marks out the painting as particularly special. While these strong hues may be the first to catch the viewer's eye, Hilton's careful handling of a complex but measured palette shows his flair and mastery of the abstract medium at this time which had been so lauded by the critics, and rightly so. The painting is bordered by delicate, warm peach tones, while white and off-white paint is applied with varying techniques to provide contrasting intensities of colour, and a painted surface which intrigues. While the central area has a thin, sparing layer of off-white paint, the half-circle along the lower edge has been created first with a palette knife, the upper sliver then finished with swirling impasto strokes. A mist of hazy charcoal is smoothed over the central area of paint lending a grainy, subtle, shadowed surface to the work, inviting closer inspection and fading off towards the top edges. Bold brushstrokes luxuriate in the application of the deep royal blue and cobalt tones, catching the light and showing Hilton's delight in the slick, smooth application of these rich paints.

While painting provides the form of the present work, Hilton's ever-present concern with drawing shapes it, contains it, encircles it, defines it. His characteristic charcoal line provides the organic sweep that curves through the centre of the work, reminiscent perhaps of bodily shapes, but often intangible or so far removed from the original source, that one can only see a suggestion or trace of this. As Andrew Lambirth has noted, for Hilton, incorporating charcoal into a painting was his own unique development, integral to many of his most successful abstract works: 'Visible charcoal lines in a painting usually suggest under-drawing, the artist's preliminary ideas. Hilton turned this preconception on its head, for in his pictures the charcoal was of crucial importance, as important as the paint' (ibid., p.111). In fact, Hilton often applied the charcoal last, not first, raising the drawn line to equal status as the traditionally exalted paint. As Lambirth has so succinctly put it: 'in a very real way, the drawing is as important as the painting' (ibid., p.155).

In the present lot, we have a supreme example of Hilton's best work from a decade when critical and commercial appreciation began to really recognise his achievements. A master of the medium, this is a painter at the height of his powers. In an abstract language that suggests, but is not defined by, its references to the outside world, be that figural muse or airy Cornish landscape, Hilton created a style which combines the painterly gesture and drawn line which is uniquely his own.