ROBERT HILLS, OWS (1769-1844)
Robert Hills was born in Islington on 26 June 1769. He trained in London under John Alexander Gresse until 1788, when he entered the Royal Academy Schools. However, as a painter of animals – his best-known achievement – he largely taught himself through the study of nature. An accomplished student of anatomy, he issued an extensive series of Etchings of Quadrupeds (1798-1815). In addition to his own works, he added deer or cattle to the foreground of landscapes by other artists, notably George Fennel Robson, William Andrews Nesfield and George Barret Junior.
Hills was a founder member and the first Secretary of the Old Water-Colour Society, though he retired during its period as the Oil and Water-Colour Society.
He was re-elected to the reconstituted society in 1823, and then acted as both Treasurer (in 1823) and Secretary (from 1831 until his death). In all, he exhibited six hundred works with the society, which ranged from restrained tinted drawings to the later, more virtuosic, stippled watercolours.
Hills made many tours in Britain, accompanying his friend James Ward, and staying with such patrons as Walter Fawkes of Farnley Hall, Yorkshire. He also travelled abroad, visiting Paris in 1814, and the site of the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, only two weeks after the event. In 1831, he went to Jersey in the Channel Islands, returning there two years later with Robson. However, most of his landscapes were made in Surrey and western Kent. He lived in London and died there on 14 May 1844.
