HILDER, Rowland

Rowland FHilder OBE (1905 – 1993) was an English landscape artist and book illustrator. Hilder studied at Goldsmiths’ College. As a student with little money he cycled into Kent and discovered the Shoreham Valley in the North Downs where he sketched the same barn drawn by the painter Samuel Palmer in the 1820s. Hilder was commissioned by Oxford University Press to illustrate books. He was awarded the Times Illustrator award for his end papers and monochrome drawings of Stevenson’s Treasure Island in 1929. In the 1930s he illustrated several books. In 1929 Hilder was commissioned by Shell Mex Ltd to illustrate “Then and Now”, a travel guide which started a long relationship with the company with posters sponsored by them. In 1953 when asked by the publisher George Rainbird to provide background landscapes to a series of wildflowers by another artist, Hilder showed him pictures of flowers by his wife Edith. Rainbird then commissioned them both to create the Shell “Flowers of the Countryside” series. Demand was so great that Shell set up an office to deal with correspondence and 13 million plates were published. He has been called ‘the Turner of his generation’, and according to the Dictionary of National Biography ‘The description “Rowland Hilder country” (attached primarily to the weald of Kent) evokes a landscape as distinctive and personal as “Constable’s country” along the Suffolk Stour.’