Tim Hilton, the British journalist, biographer of John Ruskin, and art critic who wrote for the Guardian and Independent on Sunday, died January 6. He was 82. The Guardian reported that "in his introduction to the first volume of his defining biography of John Ruskin, he wrote: 'When I was an undergraduate in the early 1960s, I was asked to understand that an interest in Ruskin was as foolish as an enthusiasm for modern art.' It is confirmation of Tim's resistance to convention that his life became defined by both subjects."
Hilton led the revival of interest in Ruskin since the 1960s and began work on his biography in the early 1970s. John Ruskin: The Early Years appeared in 1985, but it was not until 2000 that John Ruskin: The Later Years followed.
After graduating from Oxford, Hilton went on to the then small Courtauld Institute of Art in London to begin a PhD. The director, Anthony Blunt, assigned him and a fellow postgraduate, Anita Brookner, to teach a course on art criticism, with Hilton teaching the English tradition and Brookner the French. "After two years he became a freelance critic, and taught in art schools, principally Birmingham, Norwich and St Martin's in London. He loved the talk in art schools and was an inspiring teacher, because he believed artists learned by doing," the Guardian noted.
During the 1960s and 1970s, which were what he called "the anarchic golden age of British art schools," he became close friends with many artists, wrote introductory essays for artist catalogues, and worked on shows for the British Council. His critical mentor was the American Clement Greenberg, "Uncle Clem," with whom he drank vodka in New York and London, and whose Art and Culture (1961) he thought "the best single work of modern art criticism."
Hilton worked long hours in the library of the British Museum. He was not proud of his first-written book, Keats and His World (1971), but the first-published, The Pre-Raphaelites (1970), became very popular. His critical study Picasso appeared in 1976, The Sculpture of Phillip King in 1992.
In the 1980s, he continued his work as a journalist, writing first for the Guardian and then the Independent on Sunday. An avid cyclist, in the 1990s he published One More Kilometre and We're in the Showers: Memoirs of a Cyclist. He also wrote a full-length study of Vincent van Gogh, though a dispute with the publisher over illustrations led to its non-appearance.
He continued to work on Ruskin studies. "To the end he remained what he had always been, a wayward and brilliant critic and scholar, an elegant writer, and one of the last true bohemians, completely unconventional, certain of his views, and who lived his whole life as he pleased," the Guardian noted.