The last Modernist

A striking muse filled with irrepressible joy, it wasn’t until a decade after her husband’s death that Rose Hilton truly flowered as an artist, believes Ian Collins

- Ian Collins

ROSE HILTON, who would have been 90 this summer, is being celebrated with a sparkling memorial show in London. Her brilliantly abstracted landscapes and figures in intriguing settings combine in a toast to life.

She was the last survivor from the heyday of Modernist art in Cornwall. As muse and carer for the rampageous Roger Hilton, she also had a rare perspective as a liberated artist and a put-upon wife. Her art evolved ravishingly in the half of her life spent in merry widowhood, but it had always been her mainspring. She made the most of every scrap of existence, revelling in people most of all.

When I posed for her once, in a studio high above Newlyn harbor, she said: ‘This is so good of you. The last man who took his clothes off in my studio came to read the electricity meter.’ Such was this woman’s charm. Her looks were a knockout, too. A tall, lithe figure who could throw together designer outfits and bargain-basement refits, she remained unselfconsciously stylish until her death aged 87.

Born Rosemary Phipps, a Kent baker’s daughter from Leigh, near Tonbridge, she was the fourth of eight children in a Plymouth Brethren family. Art and music were banned—save for Biblical scenes and chapel hymns—but the quietly subversive siblings conspired to enjoy blissful rural childhoods.

Mrs Phipps, a thwarted missionary, settled for enlisting her children in the service of the Lord—preachers, ideally, or at least doctors, nurses and teachers. Rosemary secretly applied to the Royal College of Art and all hell broke loose when a scholarship was secured.