Arthur Derek Hill was born at Bassett in Hampshire on 6 December 1916. His father was the cricketer A J L Hill. Derek was educated at Marlborough College, but left at the age of 16 in 1933 and set off to a variety of European cities to study stage design. In Munich, he studied Bauhaus principles, worked with Paul Colin in Paris, and produced designs for a performance of Rameau’s Castor and Pollux at the Oxford University Opera Club in 1935. He travelled to Vienna, Florence and Russia, crossing Siberia to Japan, visiting Peking, Bali, Angkor Wat and Siam. In Vienna, he studied under Dr Josef Gregor, head of the National Theatre Collection, and produced sets and costumes for Agamemnon, but the Anschluss of 1938 ended that production. In Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev, he worked on stage design and made many drawings. Returning to London, he undertook the sets and costumes for Frederick Ashton’s The Lord of Burleigh at Sadler’s Wells in 1937. The next year, he met the couturier and collector of Impressionist paintings Edward Molyneux, who urged Hill to relinquish stage design for serious art. During the Second World War, Hill was a Conscientious Objector. He worked on a farm at Romsey and painted in his spare time. In 1940 Sir Edward Marsh bought one of his paintings for the Contemporary Art Society. In 1943 he had his first one man show, and in 1944 and 1945 he organised exhibitions at Wildenstein’s Gallery. In 1946 he bought a house at Donegal in Ireland. In 1947 he was commissioned by Covent Garden to devise the sets and costumes for Il Trovatore. Through his friendship with the critic Bernard Berenson, Hill met Ben Nicholson and wintered in Florence for some years in consequence. In 1952 he mounted the ‘Degas Exhibition’ for the Tate Gallery and the Edinburgh Festival. In the years 1953-55 Hill was Art Director at the British School in Rome, where he nourished such talent as Michael Andrews, John Bratby and Anthony Fry. His own art collection included early abstract paintings by his friend Victor Pasmore. In 1954 Hill bought the former St Columb’s Rectory at Gartan in Ireland. Although an inveterate traveller, he spent a goodly part of his year in Donegal from then on, including regular trips to Tory Island, where he had a painting hut and captured seascapes and brooding skies. He founded and mentored the artists’ community there, teaching local fishermen how to paint. Grey Gowrie described him as the best painter of Irish landscapes since J B Yeats. He had a retrospective at the Whitechapel Galleries in 1961. During the 1960s Hill enjoyed considerable success as a painter of portraits, producing some five or six a year. His sitters included: Artur Rubenstein; Bernard Berenson; Lords Hailsham; Mountbatten, Dufferin, Drogheda, Zuckerman and Longford; Isaiah Berlin; Anthony Eden; John Betjeman; Frederick Ashton; Noël Coward; L P Hartley; Kenneth Clarke; Steven Runciman; Osbert Lancaster; Wilfred Thesiger; Erskine Childers; George Christie and the Duke of Buccleuch. His last major portrait was of the actor Sir Alec Guinness – ‘so delightful, but so difficult because his genius depends on the anonymity of his face.’ An enthusiastic art collector and traveller, with a wide range of friends, Hill always thought of himself as a loner. ‘All I want is peace’, he would say to his friends, yet could be wounded by his failure to receive their invitations. He enjoyed royal company and was at Wolfsgarten when Princess Margaret of Hesse died suddenly in January 1997. He lunched with Lord Mountbatten and could so easily have been on the fatal boating expedition at Mullaghmore on 27 August 1979. He was about to depart on a painting expedition with the Prince of Wales on 1 September 1997, when news arrived of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. In 1981 Hill donated St Columb’s along with his art collection, including his Picassos, to the Irish State. He was appointed CBE in 1997. The Royal Hibernian Academy mounted a retrospective exhibition of his work in 1998. He was made an honorary Irish citizen by President Mary McAleese in 1999. He died in a nursing home at Ladbroke Grove, London on 30 July 2000 and was buried with his parents in Hampshire. The Derek Hill Foundation Scholarship at the British School at Rome would subsequently be endowed in his memory.