Roger Hilton was one of the most exciting and progressive painters working in Britain after the Second World War. From the mid-1950s he was regularly visiting St Ives, settling permanently in West Cornwall in 1965. Suggestions of boats, floating figures and water soon appeared in his work. He became a key member of The St Ives School, following Patrick Heron’s invitation to join the group.

Hilton’s first visit to Cornwall coincided with the start of his mature period and a shift in his abstract paintings; brushwork became looser, edges softened, and lines looped and trailed. An interest in abstraction, organic forms and earthy colours led to an affinity with artists like Terry Frost and Peter Lanyon. Hilton also had a deep understanding of how artists were working internationally; he returned to the use of a shallow pictorial space, as seen in the present work, following trips to Europe.

Yet Hilton’s aesthetic values set him apart from his contemporaries. By the late 1950s, he returned to his primary concern of reinventing figuration at a time when formalism prevailed. His sketched charcoal lines contrast the flat blocks of colour and are as important as the paint. As in the present work, curved forms and quick lines suggest intimate body parts. Hilton commented: “Abstraction in itself is nothing. It is only a step towards a new figuration, that is, one which is more true... For an abstract painter there are two ways out or on: he must give up painting and take to architecture, or he must reinvent figuration.”

Hilton drew directly onto the canvas creating a sense of immediacy, which works in unison with his perfectly balanced compositions. The improvisatory quality means Hilton’s paintings are easily distinguishable from each other – he disliked doing the same thing more than once. Still, there is a common discipline in his use of line, colour, and form to articulate space. By engaging with the edges of the canvas he makes the forms reach outwards. Patrick Heron observed: “Hilton’s ‘flat colour-patches advance, bodily, physically, it seems, from the canvas towards one, and out into the room. Space in such works is not an illusory area behind the picture: it is an actual event, the physical operation of the picture on the room.”

In 1968, Hilton was at the peak of his powers and was showing in many exhibitions each year, with '68 including a solo show at the Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol - where the present work was exhibited - Travers Gallery, London, and Bear Lane Gallery, Oxford. Hilton's work was shown internationally too, thanks in part to backing from the British Council, who reinforced his role as a key exponent of British avant-garde art.