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Roy Hilton was born on February 24, 1891, in Boston, Massachusetts. When he was a child his parents moved to Winchester, Massachusetts, where he lived until moving to Pittsburgh. He attended the Phillips Academy at Andover, and in 1909 he entered the Eric Pape School to study art. He later spent two years studying at the Fenway School of Illustration. For ten years during the summer he maintained a studio in the artists' colony at Ogunquit, Maine. Among the many American painter's he came in contact with there was Charles Woodbury, with whom he studied for two years. In 1928 he moved to Pittsburgh to serve as an instructor in the Department of Painting and Design at Carnegie Institute of Technology.
Hilton joined the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh not long after he arrived and became a regular exhibitor in the group's annual shows. At the 22nd annual in 1932, he was awarded the Carnegie Institute Prize for his group of four oil paintings, and in 1941 he won the Art Society of Pittsburgh Prize at the 31st annual. His painting, Suburban Station won the Christian J. Walter Prize for landscape in 1942, and he received an honorable mention for The Big Barn at the 34th annual in 1943. He also exhibited at the first ten and the thirteenth Exhibition of Paintings by Pittsburgh Artists, held every summer at Carnegie Institute.
He was represented in the 1933 and 1935 Carnegie Internationals, the 1942 Artists for Victory Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and also exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Corcoran Gallery, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio. In the late-1930s Hilton worked for the Works Progress Administration: he was commisssioned by the Federal Section of Fine Arts in 1937 to paint two murals, one in the post office at Westfield, New Jersey, and the other at the post office at Rockymount, Virginia. In 1943, the Carnegie Institute selected Hilton for its annual one-man exhibition, a series that featured the work of contemporary western Pennsylvania artists.
In his catalogue Southwestern Pennsylvania Painters, Paul Chew writes: "Hilton's work relied on strong design and draughtsmanship; he stressed these qualities in his art classes. His painting showed an interest in simplification, pattern, and the play of light; an interest in the non-traditional, even in what might be considered unpictorial. The artist's interest in light, both artificial and natural, and the kind of edge it gives to inanimate objects causing each element to stand out separately is evident in both his earlier, more conventional paintings done in a softer manner and his later (mid 1930s and 40s) hard edge painting. In the 1940s Hilton's work had been compared to the work of the Precisionist painters, Charles Sheeler and Niles Spenser."
Hilton taught at Carnegie Institute for almost thirty years, retiring in the late 1950s. In 1959 he recieved a jury award at the 49th annual exhibition of the Associated Artists of Pittsburgh. His work is in the collections of the Westmoreland County Museum of Art, Greensburg; The Board of Public Education, Pittsburgh; the Duquesne Club, Pittsburgh; and the Greater Latrobe School District, Latrobe.
The Steidle Collection contains three works by Roy Hilton. Steel Works in Winter was donated in the mid 1930s; it presents a birds-eye view of a steel mill in winter. The foreground is in shadow, the sun being blocked by the hill from which the scene was painted. In the middle ground, the artist depicts a number of yellow, blue, and brown buildings nestled among a forest of chimneys. Most of the canvas is dominated by white and grey, however, indicating the snow-covered ground and rooftops, as well as the smoke rising from chimneys that obscures the upper portion of the canvas.
In his painting Coal, donated in the late 1940s or early 1950s, the artists palette has changed to more sombre shades of grey and black. Only the dark maroon caboose on the left and the red and green lenses of the small switch lantern depart from the overall grey effect of the scene. Here Hilton has captured a view of a railyard, two swithching locomotive manuever coal cars on a series of tracks, while on the horizon an endless train of cars stretches from one end of the canvas to the other.
The Miner was presented on November 11, 1967, by Mr. Edward G. Fox, class of 1925, and his wife. Mr Fox was the former president of the Bituminous Coal Operations Association in Washington, D.C. Hilton's portrait of a miner is comparable to Frank Melega's Joe Petko; both works show a three-quarter bust of a miner in his workclothes with lunch pails and lanterns. In the background, Hilton, like Melega, depicts the structures of the mine where this man spends his workdays toiling. Like Coal, it is presented in shades of grey and black, only a few areas, such as the blue battery pack on the figure's belt or his pale green shirt, depart from the overall color scheme.
A similar work by Hilton was exhibited in the third Exhibition of Paintings by Pittsburgh Artists at the Carnegie Institute in the summer of 1936. Titled The Miner, it is almost identical to the Steidle Collection's Miner. It is possible that they are the same painting, the original having been cut down to eliminate a few inches from the left side and several inches from the bottom of the canvas. The only perceivable difference is the face of the miner, which may have been altered to suit the original purchaser of the work.
Sources:
Hilton, Roy, "Pittsburgh's Own Show," (portrait) Carnegie Magazine, vol. 13, February 1940, pp. 259-266.
"Pittsburgh Show Raises Query, 'Is Art Going Baroque or Archaic?'" with illustration of the The Miner in Art Digest, vol. 10, July 1936, p. 42.
O'Connor, John Jr., "Paintings by Roy Hilton: Carnegie Institute Presents a On-Man Show of a Pittsburgh Artist," Carnegie Magazine, vol. 17, May 1943, pp. 44-47.
"Alumnus Donates Painting," Mineral Industries, December 1967.
Brignano, Mary. The Associated Artists of Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh: Associated Artists of Pittsburgh, 1985.
Chew, Paul. Southwestern Pennsylvania Painters. Greensburg, Pa.: Westmoreland Museum of Art, 1989.
Falk, Peter Hastings (edit.). Who Was Who in American Art. Madison, CT: Sound View Press, 1985.
This document copyright © 1996, Eric John Schruers