Rose Hilton (1931-2019), Untitled

Rose Hilton (1931-2019)
Untitled
signed 'R Phipps' (on the reverse)
oil and charcoal on canvas
36 x 48 in. (91.4 x 121.9 cm.)
Painted circa 1958.

Special Notice

Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's Resale Right Regulations 2006 apply to this lot, the buyer agrees to pay us an amount equal to the resale royalty provided for in those Regulations, and we undertake to the buyer to pay such amount to the artist's collection agent.

Pre-Lot Text
PROPERTY FROM THE ESTATE OF DAVID METHUEN CAMPBELL
David Methuen Campbell, who died last year aged 89, was an artist who had life-long friendships with many of the contemporaries he first studied with or was introduced to in the 1940s and '50s – Sandra Blow, Frank Bowling, Rose Hilton and Howard Hodgkin. He first met Howard Hodgkin at Eton where they were taught in the drawing school by Wilfred Blunt. David went on to study painting at the Bath Academy of Art at Corsham under teachers who included William Scott and Peter Lanyon and then in Paris in Fernand Leger’s ‘Academy of Realism’. David returned to London to attend the Royal College of Art between 1950 and 1954 where Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossof were contemporaries. He also met the young Frank Bowling who was working at the RCA before studying there. Frank noted, in an exhibition of his mentors at the Cello Factory in 2012, that at that time in the '50s David had introduced him to the Wallace Collection to look at Richard Parkes Bonnington and French Painting, and they continued to be friends.
David showed his work at some avant-garde galleries in Wales, including one in Swansea run by a Guardian art critic, and exhibited work at The London Group and at the Royal Academy receiving consistently good reviews.
In the late 1950s he bought an artist’s house, a once speculative development by the Victorian ‘genre’ artist Myles Birkett Foster, where he worked for the rest of his life. In the early 1960s David was briefly engaged to Sandra Blow who introduced him to new and radical techniques and approaches to art. He was now part of a community of artists, including Anne Martin whom he was eventually to marry, who socialised and shared the facilities of each other’s studios, as well as studio talk. Anne recalls drawing at David’s studio as well as an event in a café in London’s Victoria station when David restored order to a small group of friends who had assembled to support Rosemary Phipps’ (later Hilton) departure for Paris.
David’s own paintings subtly evoke the influence of Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard, and his approach to painting was also Cezanne-like in the way that he concentrated upon the analytic exploration of the act and experience of painting while paying little regard to the work’s subsequent display or potential renown, developing a method of painting from memory, a scene that had been rapidly sketched in situ. This technique caused Stephen Gardiner to title his 1980 Listener review of David’s 1980 Sandford Gallery exhibition as ‘Memory Man’.
After this exhibition, David worked at painting and drawing every day for the rest of his life but chose to exhibit only very rarely.
If we look at the paintings that he made, as a response to the way in which he saw art and the world, he seems to have synthesised the influence of his early mentors with an expression of autobiographical subjectivity that constitutes a unique emotional vision.
We are very grateful to Dr Paul O’Kane for preparing this introduction.