THIS SUMMER the Glebe Gallery in Donegal, which is Derek Hill's gift to the nation, mounted an exhibition to mark his 80th birthday which ran for some months. It was drawn from his private collection and was a fairly modest undertaking in terms of scale and numbers 24 of his own paintings, many or most of them small, and a cross section of the other artists he has bought over the years. They were an eclectic, even idiosyncratic lot Jack Yeats, Evie Hone, John Craxton, Basil Blackshaw, Frank Brangwyn, Louis le Brocquy, and three paintings by the now dead Tory Island primitive, James Dixon.
The Glebe has been much written about and hardly needs further description here. On the shores of Lough Gartan, about a dozen miles from Letterkenny, it was originally St Columb's, a former rectory which became Hill's, own home for years until in 1981 he gave it, and what it contains to the nation. The Board of Works rebuilt converted the outbuildings and stables into a very handsome, light filled modern gallery, now filled with paintings, drawings, a few pieces of sculpture and Hill's collection of Islamic pottery. Standing as it does on the edge of Glenveagh National Park, it has become a tourist stop in the summer months. It has its own staff and a fair degree of autonomy.
Hill moved out and his local base is now in a small farmhouse half a mile away. A compulsive traveller, who appears to have seen at least two thirds of the globe in his time, he is often absent from Donegal, either on his travels or working in his studio house in London. For many years, too, he went regularly on long painting holidays in Tory Island, working in a shed in almost total isolation. (The discovery some have even called it invention" of the Tory Island Painters has been almost entirely his initiative.) Nevertheless, he is a legend locally and "Mr Hill" is pointed out to visitors as a celebrity and asset, who is also very approachable as a private person.
Portrait painting has been Hill's career and landscape painting has been his first love. In the first capacity, he has painted at least two generations of politicians, actors, members of the British royal family, church prelates, peers and salon hostesses, society beauties, Beautiful People, fellow artists, writers (including John Betjeman, who was at Marlborough School with Hill's elder brother), musicians, dons and businessmen (including Tony O'Reilly, a friend). When he painted Noel Coward in Switzerland, Coward remarked "Derek dear, remember I have painted my own face in the theatre over the last 50 years so I know it very, very much better than you ever will." However, he liked the result.
THE landscapist is another aspect of him and represents the private Hill, capable of working monastically alone in Tory or Mayo or on some vine covered hill in Tuscany. In the opinion of many, it is in this genre that his best work has been done though there are also delightful small, impromptu paintings of musicians playing, or the much reproduced picture of Bernard Berenson, aged and bedridden being read to by his consolatrice, "Nicky" Mariano.
The collector is yet another facet. For decades he bought pictures, mostly from artists he knew and liked, though also works by Yeats, Daubigny and many more. In his own words, in a foreword to the catalogue to the Glebe exhibition "I have seldom sold a picture without buying one usually by a younger and often unknown artist." In Italy, he helped Morandi to obtain paints and was thanked with the gift of two watercolours.
Hill was originally trained as a stage designer, and in that capacity visited the Soviet Union as a young man and even worked for Meyerhold. During the second World War he was a "conchie", which was not easy in the emotional climate of the time, but his career as a painter did not really take off until the late 1940s. His links with Ireland go back a long way, though he has no Irish blood his father was a businessman who once played cricket with W.G. Grace, and his mother came from an old Quaker family.
He moved to Ireland in 1953, the year he bought St Columb's, and in that year he also met Jack Yeats, whom he liked and admired. Before that, he had been art director of the British School in Rome, where he put an entire generation of English painters through his hands and met his opposite number for France, Balthus now widely regarded as the greatest painter alive. But then, Hill appears to have known every body, from Garbo to Matisse the range of his friendships is famous and he is also known as a man who kept his friends.
The short note he himself contributed to the catalogue for this summer's show (entitled "Hill's Horizon") has a valedictory note "My own children are my own paintings, and being a bachelor in his eightieth year, are as cherished by me as if they were humans. Apart from portraits that may or may not sell, I hate having to part with the landscapes that will remind me of a place where I have been happy, of the people that lived in or nearby these places, friends that have so contributed to a full lifetime."
