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Roger Hilton was one of several British artists to embrace abstraction in the early 1950s and visited St. Ives regularly from 1956 until 1965, when he settled in the Cornish town of St. Just. Hilton shared Terry Frost’s habit of integrating coastal features such as boats, bathers, and rocks into his compositions. In the early 1960s he made a series of paintings that were more overtly figurative but were nevertheless limited to a few bold shapes, and a palette of three or four bright colors. The majority of Hilton’s paintings were given pragmatic titles that refer, as does this one, to the date of their conception. Painting, Summer 1963 was probably started while the artist was holidaying in Saint-Géry, a village in southwest France.

Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2020

Roger Hilton was one of several British artists to embrace abstraction in the early 1950s and visited St. Ives regularly from 1956 until 1965, when he settled in the Cornish town of St. Just. Hilton shared Terry Frost’s habit of integrating coastal features such as boats, bathers, and rocks into his compositions. In the early 1960s he made a series of paintings that were more overtly figurative but were nevertheless limited to a few bold shapes, and a palette of three or four bright colors. The majority of Hilton’s paintings were given pragmatic titles that refer, as does this one, to the date of their conception. Painting, Summer 1963 was probably started while the artist was holidaying in Saint-Géry, a village in southwest France.

Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 2016

Hilton was one of the artists who made the town of St Ives, at the far south-western tip of England, a major center of postwar abstract art. From the time of his first visit there in 1956, he introduced into his abstractions vaguely figurative elements (or "attachments" as he called them) that recall the lines of boats, harbors, and coastlines. He spent the summer of 1963 at St. Gery in France, where he probably painted the present work. While at St. Gery he also wrote a letter to his fellow St. Ives artist Terry Frost on the position of British painting in relation to French and American. He admired contemporary American painters but felt they depended too much on "philosophical ideas rather than starting with the paint."

Gallery label for installation of YCBA collection, 1999