Cornfields September

This work forms part of an important collection of 80 nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century pictures donated to Mottisfont Abbey through the Art Fund by the distinguished artist and collector Derek Hill CBE. Leaving school at sixteen to study stage and costume design, he gradually abandoned stage work in favour of painting. Derek Hill is perhaps best known as a portrait artist but was also, in the words of a friend and critic, a master of landscape. As a collector, Derek Hill's interests lay particularly in the work of those artists who inspired him as a painter, and in paintings which reflect an interest in his English, Irish, and Italian contemporaries, with a preference for small paintings of considerable intensity, a quality reflected in his own best work.