Rose Hilton
Artist in the modern Cornish tradition who was praised for her vivid colours and her generous spirit
ROSE HILTON, who has died aged 87, was the last survivor from the glory days of modern art in Cornwall – the partner of Roger Hilton and a scintillating painter in her own right. She tackled a tricky life with indomitable joy. She was born Rosemary Phipps, a baker’s daughter from the Kent village of Leigh, on August 15 1931. She was the fourth of eight children in a Plymouth Brethren family. Much was banned, including art, save for biblical scenes. But for a child with the happy gene there could be no oppression, and hers was a blissful rural childhood.
She fooled her parents during her five years at Beckenham Art School by feigning an interest in teacher training, when all she wanted was to pursue a career in art. Secretly, she applied to the Royal College of Art, and all hell broke loose when a scholarship was secured. A beloved older brother told their mother and father that they would never see him again unless Rosemary won her freedom.
By now the family lived in another Kent village, Downe, where her mother, Mrs Phipps, the spirited Louie, shook her fist daily at a memorial to Charles Darwin. Her secret vice was an addiction to cerealpacket competitions, but her cover was blown when she won a Mini.
At art college, Rosemary, as a devout Christian, felt deeply conflicted, while liking the fact that new friends called her Rose. It suggested the warmth and openness of a barmaid in a student pub on the Fulham Road.
Amid all the pressures she contracted tuberculosis, diagnosed by Louie as “God’s vengeance”. But Rose viewed incarceration in an isolation unit as a lucky break for catching up on lost reading. She also had a first affair, with another patient, “to see what it felt like”.
Back at the Royal College, tutor John Minton passed her on the stairs and said: “Cheer up – have a double whisky.” So she did. Chelsea, where she took a flat, was swinging long before the 1960s and Rose joined the party. Tall, and with a willowy beauty, she could have been a model, looking fabulous to the last in designer outfits or jumble-sale finds.
Rose was friendly with such artistic rebels as Robyn Denny, Derek Boshier and Richard Smith, but her own work was more mainstream, impressionistic and underpinned by deft drawing. She scooped prizes and graduated with a first alongside Smith.
Winning the 1958 Abbey Minor award to study in Rome – coinciding with the filming of La Dolce Vita – she let her flat to a painter called Sandra Blow, who became a lifelong friend. Rose was unimpressed by the gloomy older man Sandra brought with her to the viewing. He was Roger Hilton, lately estranged from his wife.
Back in London, and scraping along by waitressing, Rose dated another of Sandra’s friends, the photographer Roger Mayne. But the other Roger, less gloomy now, and determined to be a fixture, invited her on a trip to Cornwall in 1959.
Roger Hilton was the alcoholic bad boy of British art, and poor marital material. He and Rose were married for his final, and most fertile, 16 years, despite his proclamation at the start of their relationship: “I’m the painter in this set-up.”
In 1966 they settled in the mining village of Botallack above Cape Cornwall, Rose putting her art on hold to support Roger and bring up their two sons.
There were wild times as whisky flowed, especially with the poet WS Graham, and Methodist neighbours were dumbfounded when, in swift succession, Roger was jailed for drink-driving then awarded a CBE. In 1963 one of Rose’s wilder moments – dancing naked on a French balcony to break the tension after a row – inspired Hilton’s most famous painting, Oi Yoi Yoi (now in the Tate). “I knew how to make him laugh,” she said.
Roger Hilton had been an artist of austere abstraction, but now a lithe female figure – Rose – danced through his art, culminating in the carnival procession of gouaches produced in his last, bedridden years. The model muse briefly escaped to America. “Come back, I’m dying,” he wired. “Not yet, I’m living,” she replied.
Rose had faith in Roger’s painting. But in the end she painted in secret until Roger said: “I can tell you’ve been at it. I can smell the turps.” Then he encouraged her.
Widowed at 44, she took a decade to recover before finding herself as an artist. As a measure of her stature, so many others painted liked Roger, but she never did. Her colourist gods were Matisse and Bonnard, and when latterly she advanced from figuration towards full abstraction it was entirely on her own terms.
Rose Hilton’s art flowered in her seventies. Exhibitions with Messum’s gallery in London became more and more ambitious and successful, and in 2008 Tate St Ives staged the retrospective Rose Hilton: The Beauty of Ordinary Things. Reviewing the show in The Spectator, Andrew Lambirth praised her art for celebrating the glory in everyday life and for its “variety, freshness and pre-eminent generosity of spirit”.
She depicted interiors, still life, landscape and figures: although she loved men, in her art she focused on the female nude. One rare male model was told: “The last man to take his clothes off in my studio came to read the electricity meter.”
She was a star of Michael Craig-martin’s 2015 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, and stole the show in the accompanying BBC documentary.
Rose Hilton had charm and courage. She died at home in Cornwall, refusing to go into hospital, and planning another party.