Adrian Hill

Adrian Keith Graham Hill (24 March 1895 – 1977) was a British artist, writer, art therapist, educator, and broadcaster. Hill served with the Honourable Artillery Company during World War I and was the first artist commissioned by the Imperial War Museum to record the conflict on the Western Front. He wrote many books about painting and drawing, and in the 1950s and early 1960s presented a BBC children's television programme called Sketch Club.

Education Hill was born in Charlton, London, and educated at Dulwich College. He went on to study at the St John's Wood Art School between 1912 and 1914. After his war service Hill studied at the Royal College of Art in 1919 and 1920.

World War I

At the start of World War I, Hill enlisted with the Honourable Artillery Company and, due to his artistic abilities was assigned to a Scouting and Sniping Section. This work often involved operating in front of the Allied trenches to sketch the disposition of the enemy. Later in life, Hill recalled a typical such patrol into no man's land: "I advanced in short rushes, mostly on my hands and knees with my sketching kit dangling round my neck. As I slowly approached, the wood gradually took a more definite shape, and as I crept nearer I saw that what was hidden from our own line, now revealed itself as a cunningly contrived observation post in one of the battered trees."

In 1938, while convalescing from tuberculosis at the King Edward VII Sanatorium in Midhurst, he passed the time by drawing nearby objects from his hospital bed, and found the process helpful in aiding his own recovery. In 1939, occupational therapy was introduced to the sanatorium for the first time and Hill was invited to teach drawing and painting to other patients - at first to injured soldiers returning from the war, and then to general civilian patients. The Adamson Collection of about 6000 drawings, paintings, ceramics and sculptures by people compelled to live at Netherne was at Lambeth Hospital in South London between 1997 and 2012, and has now being re-located to the Wellcome Library in anticipation of a securer future in several international institutions.

Hill worked tirelessly to promote art therapy, eventually becoming president of the British Association of Art Therapists, founded in 1964, though he found himself at odds with its increasingly psychoanalytical orientation. In 1968 Hill was elected president of the Royal Institute of Oil Painters. He believed that the practice of art, "in sickness and in health," could turn society away from war by making artistic creativity more appreciated. He saw art therapy as becoming an integral part of the National Health Service.

Books by Adrian Hill (selected) On the Mastery of Watercolour Painting (Pitman, 1939) Art Versus Illness (G. Allen and Unwin, 1945) Painting Out Illness (Williams & Norgate, 1951) A Book of Trees (Faber and Faber, 1951) What Shall We Draw? (Blandford, 1957) The Beginner's Book of Oil Painting (Blandford, 1958) The Beginner's Book of Watercolour Painting (Blandford, 1959) Sketching and Painting Indoors (Blandford, 1961) Sketching and Painting Out of Doors (Blandford, 1961) How to Draw (MacMillan, 1963) How to Paint in Watercolours (Pan Piper, 1967) How to Paint Landscapes and Seascapes (Blandford, 1964) The Beginner's Book of Drawing and Painting Flowers (Bl Drawing and Painting Plants and Flowers (Blandford, 1965) Drawing and Painting Architecture in Landscape (Blandford, 1966) Further Steps in Oil Painting (Blandford, 1970) Further Steps in Drawing and Sketching (Blandford, 1972) Drawing and Painting Trees (Blandford, 1977) Adrian Hill's Watercolour Painting for Beginners (Cassells, 1994) Adrian Hill's Oil Painting for Beginners (Cassells, 1994) Beginner's Book of Anatomy (Dover, 2007) Drawing and Painting Trees (Dover, 2008)