Derek Hill

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This article is about the painter. For the racing driver, see Derek Hill (driver).

Arthur Derek Hill (1916 – 30 July 2000) was an English portrait and landscape painter.

[edit] Life and work

Born in Hampshire, son of a wealthy sugar trader, Hill first worked as a theatre designer in Leningrad in the 1930s and later as an historian. His long association with Ireland began when he visited Glenveagh Castle, County Donegal to paint the portrait of the Irish-American art collector, Henry McIlhenny, whose grandfather had emigrated to the US from the nearby village of Milford, and who subsequently made a fortune from his patent gas meter.

Hill began to enjoy increased success as a portrait painter from the 1960s; his subjects including many notable composers, musicians, politicians and statesmen, such as broadcaster Gay Byrne and the Prince of Wales. He was also an enthusiastic art collector and traveller, with a wide range of friends such as Bryan Guinness and Sir Isaiah Berlin. In 1981, he donated his Donegal home, St. Columb's Rectory, which he had owned since 1954, along with a considerable collection including some Picassos, to the Irish State.

An exhibition of his work and personal art collection can be seen at the House and associated Glebe Gallery at Churchill, Letterkenny. Another collection of his work is held at Mottisfont Abbey. Many of his landscapes portray scenes from Tory Island, where he had a painting hut for years, and started and then mentored the artists' community there, teaching local fishermen how to paint. A Retrospective exhibition was arranged for and by him at the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1998. In 1999, he was made an honorary Irish citizen by president Mary McAleese.

He died at a London Hospital on 30 July, 2000, aged 83, and is buried in the South of England with his parents. Memorial services were held for him in Dublin at St Patrick's Cathedral, as well as Saint James' Church, Picadilly, London and his local Church of Ireland in Trentagh, Co. Donegal.