Peace comes dropping slow
Hugh Cecil
DEREK HILL: AN APPRECIATION by Grey Gowrie Quartet, f25 Frederick Zeuner, the late professor of Environmental Archaeology at the Lon- don University Institute, had a useful mnemonic for distinguishing between the two iron ores, haematite and biotite: `haematite' comes from the Greek, haema, meaning blood, and like blood, is red in colour; 'biotite', which is black, derives from the Greek bios, meaning life, 'and life, as we all know, is a pretty black business'. This lesson, grimly delivered in a guttural German accent, came back to me when I read Grey Gowrie's admirable presentation of the art of Derek Hill. This was not just because a fresh look at Derek Hill's exciting Donegal landscapes, primor- dial and rugged, awoke latent geological interests, but because of these arresting sentences in Gowrie's introduction:
Hill has had a privileged, interesting and fulfilled life. Like most lives, not especially artists' lives, but of special importance in their case, it has been difficult and painful as well.
As this suggests, the book is not primari- 1Y one about technique but about the interplay of the artist's personality and his treatment of favourite themes over a life- time. Derek Hill was born in 1916; adven- turous and always a keen traveller, his initial artistic training took place in Vienna and then in Russia, where he studied theatrical design. When he was 26, with the encouragement of Edward Molyneux, the designer, he began to take up painting full time. During the war he was a pacifist; afterwards he was in Italy and later settled for part of every year in Donegal. In the conversations with Grey Gowrie repro- duced here, Hill is frank about his own psychological make-up, though without giving a detailed explanation of its possible origins; he alludes to his hypersensitivity, his acute horror of destructive violence, the infrequency of his close emotional attachments and the lack of satisfaction in his physical relationships; these suggest, in a much-loved and generous-hearted man, early traumas and difficulties, for which the pictures partially represent the path of healing. Unlike some artists and writers of considerable talent, he has not been temp- ted to spit out his complex feelings in hatred and his art has the greater dignity for that, if at times it also has a muted quality.
In this book, we are presented with a representative and fascinating assemblage of pictures, which express a person and a life. Because the photo-reproduction can- not do full justice to the originals (though sometimes black-and-white photographs can enhance the impact of the best fea- tures) we are invited to 'read' the pictures rather than 'look at' them. What the book helps us to read is moving and absorbing: the story of a restless, yearning spirit, seeking human company but also peace, and a fusion between inner nature and artistic expression. Derek Hill has been best known as a portraitist; he has painted many well-known public figures over a long period — Lord Mountbatten, Lord Hailsham, the Prince of Wales, Noel Co- ward, Lord Clark, Sir Isaiah Berlin, Lord Zuckerman and Archbishop McQuaid are among the famous names depicted in this volume; while close friends and neigh- bours, some from the local Donegal peasantry, appear also in abundance indicators of an indefatigable industry and sociability.
Hill's reputation as a portrait painter is controversial. In most pictures he has achieved a striking likeness; nor can he be accused of treating his subjects unkindly, as, for example, Lucian Freud has been. Hill's portraits are sympathetic, genial and sometimes humorous, like Raymond Mor- timer (1975) and Lord Anthony Hamilton (1968). The romantic is a strong and effective element: it is to be found in the dramatic head of the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava (1983); charm, too, is well con- veyed in portraits such as that of the youthful Canon Leslie Forest.
On the other hand, the severe impress- ive picture of Wilfred Thesiger, which pleased Derek Hill and Thesiger's mother (who kept it by her bedside), produced a strong revulsion in the sitter. 'When she died,' says Hill, asked Wilfred where the picture was, and after various indecisive letters to and fro, it seemed he had asked his brother, former director of Colnaghi's, "to get rid of it". The final reply I got from his brother reads: ". . I gave it to a student, at the Byam Shaw School. . . . so that the frame should not be wasted." ' Most of the portraits in this selection are very pleasant to the eye: his amusing but ugly head of Leslie Hartley is an exception — 'his lady friends', confesses Hill, `. . . forced him to have a little curtain made to be drawn over it when they visited' — but even here there is no feeling of hostility to the subject.
The portraits show calm, reposeful, rather sad people; force and energy are rather in abeyance, though Hill is capable of communicating these qualities well, as we can see in his very early studies of grape-pickers in Tuscany and in his much later Donegal landscapes. His most suc- cessful portraits are those where there is a soulful, wistful quality about the sitter as with that of Cardinal Heard, or where, like the moving studies of the aged Beren- son, the fires of life are dying down. By contrast, though Sir John Betjeman (1975) certainly reflects a certain mournful streak in the late poet-laureate, there is lacking the gleam which was so characteristic; while the Earl of Longford (1977) seems to have been captured in a rare moment of physical prostration. Hill's interesting self- portrait shows a suffering, depressed indi- vidual and needs to be compared with his photograph on the cover; here the face is no less sensitive, but there is an impression of vitality which is absent from his vision of himself on canvas.
How does one explain this discrepancy between so many of the portraits and their subjects in a skilful and experienced pain- ter? Not, I think, because he generally sees mankind as subdued or sad, but rather, it appears from this book, because he has always tried to express in paint the tran- quillity of spirit which he desires to find in the world. He seems to have preferred to portray the human face in repose; and in repose, after early youth, the face does appear sad, because of the way that the muscles relax. He has sought the quality of repose, too, in his sunlit Italian landscapes, during the period that followed the last war, and again one feels an unconscious inhibition of his own energetic personality in order to achieve that effect.
It is in his Donegal pictures, particularly those on Tory Island, that one can see his nature and talents working together most harmoniously and consistently. The for- lorn, tussocky headlands, the tumbled dark and tawny rocks of Tory Island, the rough seas and watery Irish skies, are the ideal channel for inward torment seeking release into serenity; the end result is a series of images of profound peace which is neither static nor imposed. The picture which, for me, achieves most perfectly this trans- formation of inner restlessness into time- less calm is the beautiful Quiet Wave, painted on Tory in 1978. Here is the artist's feeling running deepest: clean salt brine without bitterness, perpetual motion with- out agitation.
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