Artist, writer, bon viveur and saviour of Suffolk clinker boats
NICOLAS HILL, who has died aged 86, was an artist, writer, interior decorator, art dealer, book collector and bon viveur whose offbeat life was spent mainly in Stockwell, Mayfair and on the Suffolk coast at Aldeburgh, where he cooked lobsters, crab, gigantic Dover sole, and “prostitute pasta”, and launched a campaign to safeguard the future of the traditional wooden clinker fishing boats on Aldeburgh beach.
Born in Ladbroke Grove, west London, on April 4 1934, the son of the Mayfairbased interior decorator John Hill, and nephew of both the painter Derek Hill and the Curzon Street book seller Heywood Hill, Nicolas was photographed by Cecil Beaton as a child and bundled off to boarding school at the age of five to escape wartime bombs.
From his first school, he wrote to his mother, whom he addressed as Mrs Hill, saying he was lonely and asking her to send him his gnome suit.
He later found his feet at Bryanston, did his National Service as an officer in the 7th Hussars, was photographed by the young Antony Armstrong-jones in full-dress uniform, and was asked to show Swiss army generals how to use a tank. Unable to get the vehicle out of reverse, he was branded a “rabbit” by his commanding officer.
In 1953 he continued his education at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he shared a room with the future multi-millionaire Dolf Mootham overlooking an enclosure known as the “lavatory yard” and begun publishing illustrations in Granta and Chandelier.
By the mid 1950s he was working for his father’s decorating business, Green and Abbott, in whose showroom, opposite the backdoor of Sotheby’s, he mounted exhibitions by the children’s book illustrators Edward Ardizzone and Shirley Hughes and re-created the famous Dali-schiaparelli lip sofa in shocking pink.
In 1956 he also put on the first exhibition by the artist Caroline James, whom he was to marry in secret the following year.
At the end of the Sixties Hill was invited to write mildly satirical articles for the Tatler about famous people’s homes, which involved trips to Italy to interview Harold Acton and to America to inspect Woody Allen’s home and to talk to a dog called Smelly who lived in the Hamptons.
In 1983 his wife Caroline, who suffered from chronic depression, ended her life by walking into the sea at Brighton, inspiring her husband to produce a complete catalogue of her pictures and get the Scarborough museum to take on a collection of her paintings.
Five years later Hill bought his first house in Aldeburgh, where he already had relations and would make many new friends. Here he embraced the “ill-founded optimism of late middle age”, played tennis, swam in the sea – and cooked a lot of fish.
At the age of 76 he produced and illustrated his first book, Chimes for Children, a collection of merry and melancholy nursery rhymes, featuring a Tesco under the sea, a dandified wasp called Billy Brown (“But, girls, watch out. He has a snout!”) – and an overweight Humpty Dumpty being told by a doctor: “Get off that wall. And jog before you have a fall!” Reading these rhymes, said Craig Brown, was “like swallowing the most magical pill.”
Another children’s book followed, Stowaway to Berlin, which included an account of the author being shown around a Lancaster Bomber as a child.
In 2013 Hill started fundraising to preserve up to 10 redundant wooden clinker boats on Aldeburgh beach.
By raising money to have them painted he hoped that the town’s fishing history, in danger of being lost as the boats rotted, would be preserved.
Nicolas Hill had friends all over England but remained happy and buoyant in Aldeburgh.
He is survived by two sons.
Nicolas Hill, born April 4 1934, died August 15 2020