Design and Art Australia Online

painter, engraver and teacher, was born in Coventry, England, son of an officer of the King’s Dragoons who had served under Wellington. After being apprenticed to a line engraver at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Hill entered the Newcastle Academy of Fine Arts in 1840. He studied under the well-known painter and printmaker William Bell Scott with whom he prepared prints after paintings by David Scott, an engraving of The Choristers after Barraud (exhibited with the South Australian Society of Arts in 1861) and other works. Hill then worked in London under Samuel William Reynolds the younger whom he assisted in making a popular engraving of the opening of the 1851 Great Exhibition.

Encouraged by Archdeacon Farr to come to South Australia to benefit his health, Hill arrived in 1854 on board the Historia . Unable to find work as a line engraver, he instituted an art school on English principles at his home in Pulteney Street, Adelaide. He was drawing master at various schools, including Dr Farr’s St Peter’s College (from 1 October 1854). In 1856 he called a meeting of 'Friends of the Arts’ at his home which formed itself into the South Australian Society of Arts, aiming to promote the visual arts by means of lectures, conversazioni , a School of Design and a permanent art gallery. Hill was its first chairman. In 1861 the South Australian School of Design was founded; Hill was its art master until 1881.

Miss H.S. Hill, a pupil at the school who was awarded a prize at the Society of Arts’ 1869 exhibition for a freehand scroll drawing copied from the London School of Design’s patterns was probably his daughter Henrietta. Copying such patterns and old master and contemporary British prints made up a large part of the curriculum and his pupils’ work was always included in the annual exhibitions of the society.

Hill himself exhibited regularly in Adelaide. At the first exhibition of the Society of Arts, in 1857, the Adelaide Observer referred to a 'pleasing picture’ by Hill 'painted in the colony, but the subject is not colonial’. In 1861 he showed The Admella Rescue (now known as The Wreck of the Admella , (Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, SA). His most ambitious oil painting, The Proclamation – which took fifteen years to complete (1855-70, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, SA) – depicts the establishment of the Province of South Australia in 1836. It includes carefully researched portraits of nearly 100 people who were present on the occasion. An early Victorian narrative rather than a grand history painting, it emphasises the cheerful domesticity of the gathering rather than the official formalities.

Hill specialised in genre and narrative subjects, a type of painting not then common in Australia. Several paintings include his own family (Hill and his wife had eight children): The Artist’s Wife and Eldest Daughter, Henrietta (1854), Mrs Hill and Children (1857, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, SA), Family Group (c.1870, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, SA) and possibly his large oil (Ayers House, Adelaide) showing Aboriginal hawkers displaying a grand possum-skin rug to a woman, who resembles Mrs Hill, standing outside her solid two-storey colonial home.

Although not known to have produced engravings in South Australia, Hill brought his engraving tools to the colony and wrote a note on the technique of etching there, presumably for teaching purposes. One lithograph made in South Australia is known – that of Sir Robert Richard Torrens. Its source was his own oil painting of Torrens, which won a local prize in 1861 and a medal at the 1881 Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition.

As a painter Charles Hill was painstaking and limited. However, his enthusiasm for art and his efforts on its behalf contributed to the establishment of South Australia’s major art institutions. As well as being an important teacher, he played a leading role in various local associations. He was for many years president of the Adelaide Sketch Club, a member of the Old Bohemian Club and an excellent marksman in one of the first Volunteer companies formed in South Australia. Contemporary sources state that his habitual dress was frock coat and high hat.

Writers:

Staff Writer

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011