Captain Henry Hill: Victorian Brighton Art Collectior
CAPTAIN HENRY HILL
Henry Hill was born in 1813 in Cullompton, Devon. He married Charlotte, who was born about 1814 in Sidmouth, Devon, which suggests that Henry Hill’s early life was spent in East Devon. They do not appear to have had any children. Henry Hill probably spent his working-life as either a taylor or as an outfitter. It is not known if this was his father’s trade or if Henry initially began trading from a base in Devon. However, in 1847, he was working as a taylor at 43,York Street, near Victoria Station, London and, by 1851, he had moved to 3 Old Bond Street and was described as a military taylor. Here he seems to have been in partnership with his brother, John, and, in 1857, their establishment was recorded as Hill Bros, military outfitters by Royal Appointment to the Queen. The firm remained based in 3-4 Old Bond Street for the rest of the century.
In 1865 Henry Hill and his wife moved to Brighton to live at 53 Marine Parade, Brighton, a four-storey Regency property, on the sea front built between 1810 and 1820. The entrance to the Chain Pier would have been nearby and, in the mid-nineteenth century, it would have been a select property well-placed in the expanding Kemp Town district. By 1869, Henry Hill had been elected as a councillor for Park Ward. He became chair of the Fine Arts sub-committee and was a councillor until at least 1877. A new purpose-built museum and art gallery was opened in Brighton in 1873 and the first exhibition there was centred on the collections of Henry Willett and Captain Henry Hill.
It is not known when Henry Hill started to collect paintings but, once established in his shop in London in Bond Street, he would have found himself surrounded by a number of prominent art galleries including the Doré Gallery, the Goupil Gallery and, most importantly of all, a gallery at 168 New Bond Street established by Paul Durand-Ruel in 1870 under the management of Charles Deschamps. The Hill brothers appear to have been very prosperous by this time and it would seem that Henry really loved his paintings and did not buy them simply as an investment. He owned some earlier British pictures by artists such as George Morland and David Cox but the bulk of his holdings was of contemporary Victorian works by English artists ranging from Val Prinsep and Fred Walker to the Scottish artists, John Pettie and William Quiller Orchardson. He had at least four paintings by Frank Holl (1845-1888) who, in addition to painting portraits, had emerged as a major painter of scenes of modern urban impoverishment and distress. Hill may have purchased these out of sympathy for Holl’s subjects, although family loyalty probably came into play as Holl’s sister was married to Hill’s brother. Hill’s Collection also included works by foreign artists: a painting by the Dutchman Josef Israël, a Fantin-Latour still-life, works by J-B-C Corot and Jean-François Millet and a major group of eighty oils and water-colours by Marie Cazin.
1876 was a very important year for Henry Hill’s Collection. He purchased Whistler’s Nocturne in Blue and Gold: Valparaiso Bay which the artist had painted in 1866. He also purchased a cluster of works by Degas, the first being Two Dancers originally exhibited in Paris by Degas in 1874. It is not known when Hill first noticed Degas’s work or when Degas identified him as a particular client. Certainly by 22 August 1875 Degas was writing from Paris to the dealer Deschamps in Bond Street, keeping him informed of his progress in completing pictures for the market and urging the need for sales: he wrote “this is the moment for me to take flight in England”. Degas had first visited Britain in 1868 and probably visited London in 1871 and 1875. The extent of the personal contact between the two is a matter of speculation but there is circumstantial evidence that he visited Brighton. It has been argued that Hill and his wife did not buy the pictures for profit as they were all still in the Collection when he died and were only sold on the death of Hill’s wife in 1892, even though Degas’s stock had risen throughout the 1880s. Hill did not seem to find the ballet subjects disreputable as many contemporary critics had done and it is possible that they struck a chord in his sympathy for the strenuous lives of the urban worker. The critic, Alice Meynell, visited the Collection and admired the “great power and certainty of draughtsmanship in Degas’s dancers” but she also wrote of the “women working chillily at their profession in the dreary grey daylight - women of all ages, thin, undersized, bony, long-elbowed, with the abnormal development of the leg muscles adding dismally to the imperfections of the unidealised form”.
Henry Hill bought one further painting by Degas. In 1876 the second Impressionist exhibition was held in Paris and Degas showed Dans un Café. It did not sell and so was shipped to London and was sold to Hill. Hill lent it to Brighton’s Third Annual Winter Exhibition of Modern Pictures which opened on 7 September 1876. This painting, now known as L’Absinthe, shows two figures seated in a café: one a streetwalker and the other a distracted man drinking a hangover cure. Perhaps Hill had been attracted to the subject matter of the painting as it again shows the urban disadvantaged. The critic of the Brighton Gazette wrote: ”The perfection of ugliness: undoubtedly a clever painting, though treated in a slapdash manner, amounting to affectation. The colour is as repulsive as the figures; a brutal sensual-looking French workman and a sickly-looking grisette; a most unlovely couple. The very disgusting novelty of the subject arrests attention. What there is to admire in it is the skill of the artist, not the subject itself’. The next chance the British public had to see L’Absinthe was at Christies on 20 February 1892. The following year, 1893, it was first shown in London at the Grafton Gallery and it provoked a furious newspaper exchange which ran for many months. It was seen as a “dirty drunken French picture”.
Frank Holl painted Henry Hill in 1880 and it was presented to Brighton Art Gallery by a ‘Mr Hill, nephew of the sitter’, in 1939. This was probably James S Hill, described as a ‘Landscape Painter Oil & Water Colours’ who lived with Henry and Charlotte Hill in Brighton. Henry Hill died on 1 April 1882 and “would almost certainly have left his Collection to Brighton but there was an argument between him and the Corporation which led to the pictures being auctioned at Christie’s instead”. There were eventually two sales. The first was held in Brighton by Christies on 25 May 1882. The second sale was held at Christies in London on 5 June 1882 and the paintings were sold for £1,362. Walter Sickert acquired The Rehearsal of the Ballet on Stage for himself although his collection was not a private museum like the Hill Collection where an attendant showed visitors into the two galleries in Hill’s Marine Parade residence. Whistler described one such visit: “I was shown into the galleries, and of course took a chair and sat looking at my beautiful Nocturne then as there was nothing else to do, I went to sleep”.
In his funeral notice Henry Hill was described as "a gentleman formerly connected with the 1st Sussex Rifle Volunteers in the capacity of Quartermaster". Presumably his experience as a military outfitter was invaluable. The threat of invasion by the French under Napoleon III was such that, by 1860, Volunteer Battalions had been formed throughout England, Scotland and Wales. The 1st Sussex Rifle Volunteer Corps was raised at Brighton in 1859. Henry Hill appears to have been made a Captain around 1877.
Richard Thomas in his catalogue to the 2005 Tate Exhibition on Degas, Sickert and Toulouse-Lautrec comments that the fact that Henry Hill’s taste could encompass Prinsep and Fred Walker and also Degas makes his Collection exceptional. Hill acquired one of Degas’s ultimately key, and most poignant, images in L’Absinthe. Degas’s work was amongst the most advanced picture-making to be found anywhere in the mid-1870s. It is all the more remarkable that such innovative work was so admired in Brighton.
Henry Hill was born in 1813 in Cullompton, Devon. He married Charlotte, who was born about 1814 in Sidmouth, Devon, which suggests that Henry Hill’s early life was spent in East Devon. They do not appear to have had any children. Henry Hill probably spent his working-life as either a taylor or as an outfitter. It is not known if this was his father’s trade or if Henry initially began trading from a base in Devon. However, in 1847, he was working as a taylor at 43,York Street, near Victoria Station, London and, by 1851, he had moved to 3 Old Bond Street and was described as a military taylor. Here he seems to have been in partnership with his brother, John, and, in 1857, their establishment was recorded as Hill Bros, military outfitters by Royal Appointment to the Queen. The firm remained based in 3-4 Old Bond Street for the rest of the century.
In 1865 Henry Hill and his wife moved to Brighton to live at 53 Marine Parade, Brighton, a four-storey Regency property, on the sea front built between 1810 and 1820. The entrance to the Chain Pier would have been nearby and, in the mid-nineteenth century, it would have been a select property well-placed in the expanding Kemp Town district. By 1869, Henry Hill had been elected as a councillor for Park Ward. He became chair of the Fine Arts sub-committee and was a councillor until at least 1877. A new purpose-built museum and art gallery was opened in Brighton in 1873 and the first exhibition there was centred on the collections of Henry Willett and Captain Henry Hill.
It is not known when Henry Hill started to collect paintings but, once established in his shop in London in Bond Street, he would have found himself surrounded by a number of prominent art galleries including the Doré Gallery, the Goupil Gallery and, most importantly of all, a gallery at 168 New Bond Street established by Paul Durand-Ruel in 1870 under the management of Charles Deschamps. The Hill brothers appear to have been very prosperous by this time and it would seem that Henry really loved his paintings and did not buy them simply as an investment. He owned some earlier British pictures by artists such as George Morland and David Cox but the bulk of his holdings was of contemporary Victorian works by English artists ranging from Val Prinsep and Fred Walker to the Scottish artists, John Pettie and William Quiller Orchardson. He had at least four paintings by Frank Holl (1845-1888) who, in addition to painting portraits, had emerged as a major painter of scenes of modern urban impoverishment and distress. Hill may have purchased these out of sympathy for Holl’s subjects, although family loyalty probably came into play as Holl’s sister was married to Hill’s brother. Hill’s Collection also included works by foreign artists: a painting by the Dutchman Josef Israël, a Fantin-Latour still-life, works by J-B-C Corot and Jean-François Millet and a major group of eighty oils and water-colours by Marie Cazin.
1876 was a very important year for Henry Hill’s Collection. He purchased Whistler’s Nocturne in Blue and Gold: Valparaiso Bay which the artist had painted in 1866. He also purchased a cluster of works by Degas, the first being Two Dancers originally exhibited in Paris by Degas in 1874. It is not known when Hill first noticed Degas’s work or when Degas identified him as a particular client. Certainly by 22 August 1875 Degas was writing from Paris to the dealer Deschamps in Bond Street, keeping him informed of his progress in completing pictures for the market and urging the need for sales: he wrote “this is the moment for me to take flight in England”. Degas had first visited Britain in 1868 and probably visited London in 1871 and 1875. The extent of the personal contact between the two is a matter of speculation but there is circumstantial evidence that he visited Brighton. It has been argued that Hill and his wife did not buy the pictures for profit as they were all still in the Collection when he died and were only sold on the death of Hill’s wife in 1892, even though Degas’s stock had risen throughout the 1880s. Hill did not seem to find the ballet subjects disreputable as many contemporary critics had done and it is possible that they struck a chord in his sympathy for the strenuous lives of the urban worker. The critic, Alice Meynell, visited the Collection and admired the “great power and certainty of draughtsmanship in Degas’s dancers” but she also wrote of the “women working chillily at their profession in the dreary grey daylight - women of all ages, thin, undersized, bony, long-elbowed, with the abnormal development of the leg muscles adding dismally to the imperfections of the unidealised form”.
Henry Hill bought one further painting by Degas. In 1876 the second Impressionist exhibition was held in Paris and Degas showed Dans un Café. It did not sell and so was shipped to London and was sold to Hill. Hill lent it to Brighton’s Third Annual Winter Exhibition of Modern Pictures which opened on 7 September 1876. This painting, now known as L’Absinthe, shows two figures seated in a café: one a streetwalker and the other a distracted man drinking a hangover cure. Perhaps Hill had been attracted to the subject matter of the painting as it again shows the urban disadvantaged. The critic of the Brighton Gazette wrote: ”The perfection of ugliness: undoubtedly a clever painting, though treated in a slapdash manner, amounting to affectation. The colour is as repulsive as the figures; a brutal sensual-looking French workman and a sickly-looking grisette; a most unlovely couple. The very disgusting novelty of the subject arrests attention. What there is to admire in it is the skill of the artist, not the subject itself’. The next chance the British public had to see L’Absinthe was at Christies on 20 February 1892. The following year, 1893, it was first shown in London at the Grafton Gallery and it provoked a furious newspaper exchange which ran for many months. It was seen as a “dirty drunken French picture”.
Frank Holl painted Henry Hill in 1880 and it was presented to Brighton Art Gallery by a ‘Mr Hill, nephew of the sitter’, in 1939. This was probably James S Hill, described as a ‘Landscape Painter Oil & Water Colours’ who lived with Henry and Charlotte Hill in Brighton. Henry Hill died on 1 April 1882 and “would almost certainly have left his Collection to Brighton but there was an argument between him and the Corporation which led to the pictures being auctioned at Christie’s instead”. There were eventually two sales. The first was held in Brighton by Christies on 25 May 1882. The second sale was held at Christies in London on 5 June 1882 and the paintings were sold for £1,362. Walter Sickert acquired The Rehearsal of the Ballet on Stage for himself although his collection was not a private museum like the Hill Collection where an attendant showed visitors into the two galleries in Hill’s Marine Parade residence. Whistler described one such visit: “I was shown into the galleries, and of course took a chair and sat looking at my beautiful Nocturne then as there was nothing else to do, I went to sleep”.
In his funeral notice Henry Hill was described as "a gentleman formerly connected with the 1st Sussex Rifle Volunteers in the capacity of Quartermaster". Presumably his experience as a military outfitter was invaluable. The threat of invasion by the French under Napoleon III was such that, by 1860, Volunteer Battalions had been formed throughout England, Scotland and Wales. The 1st Sussex Rifle Volunteer Corps was raised at Brighton in 1859. Henry Hill appears to have been made a Captain around 1877.
Richard Thomas in his catalogue to the 2005 Tate Exhibition on Degas, Sickert and Toulouse-Lautrec comments that the fact that Henry Hill’s taste could encompass Prinsep and Fred Walker and also Degas makes his Collection exceptional. Hill acquired one of Degas’s ultimately key, and most poignant, images in L’Absinthe. Degas’s work was amongst the most advanced picture-making to be found anywhere in the mid-1870s. It is all the more remarkable that such innovative work was so admired in Brighton.
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