Henry Hill

Identity:

Captain Henry Hill was a collector living at 3 Marine Parade in Brighton. His brother Edward married Frank Holl's sister.

Life:

Hill was Quartermaster in the First Sussex Rifle Volunteers, and apparently a former Bond Street tailor. He was a member of the Brighton Town Council, and assisted in the establishment of the Free Library and Brighton School of Science and Art. He was also responsible for founding the annual winter exhibitions of modern art in Brighton Pavilion. He also donated a window to the Brighton Parish Church. He began buying in the 1860s, favouring the work of artists such as Cox, Crome, Morland and their generation. In the 1870s he transferred his interests to living artists such as Mason, Walker, Holl, Philip Morris, Orchardson and McTaggart. He was also notable for his appreciation of the Barbizon School, Corot, Millet and Degas. In the 1870s he purchased Whistler's Nocturne in Blue and Gold: Valparaiso Bay y076 and lent it to be exhibited in Brighton in 1875 and in London at the Royal Society of British Artists in 1887. He bought works at dealers such as Durand-Ruel, Charles Deschamps and Christie's. According to Leighton, Hill went mad.

Bibliography:

Macleod, Dianne Sachko, Art and the Victorian Middle Class: Money and the Making of Cultural Identity, Cambridge, 1996; Young, Andrew McLaren, Margaret F. MacDonald, Robin Spencer, and Hamish Miles, The Paintings of James McNeill Whistler, New Haven and London, 1980 .