Hilton was born in Kent, in 1931 into a very religious family. There was not much art in her house but she cherished the religious illustrations that she saw. Her parents did not want her to be an artist but training in art to be a teacher was allowed.She attended the Royal College of Art in London but her parents insisted that she travel home each night to avoid the life in London. She and Bridget Riley were two of the leading students, both gaining first class degrees. She won the Life Drawing and Painting prize as well as the Abbey Minor Scholarship to Rome.
Upon her return to London, she began teaching art, and, in the late 1950s met her future husband, the leading abstract artist Roger Hilton. Roger actively discouraged his wife’s artistic endeavours, but following his death in 1975 she took up her brushes again. In 1977 she had her first solo show at Newlyn Art Gallery, and her post-impressionist, figurative paintings have achieved wide popularity.
Rose, it turned out, was sanguine about the past. With wry humour and a clarity that belied her years, she described meeting the firebrand abstract painter in the late 1950s, and recounted highs and lows of a relationship that gave her two sons before coming to an end with Roger’s death in 1975. Any anger she felt had long since faded, to be replaced by acceptance of her late husband’s failings mixed with gratitude for the help he eventually gave her. At first, she worked clandestinely. ‘“I know you’ve been doing it up there secretly,” Roger used to say. “I can smell the turps.” Rose didn’t really take too much notice, and eventually he accepted that she needed to paint and ended up giving her more helpful advice than she ever received at art school. He had tremendously good training in Paris, and he taught Rose about colour and tone in a way shed never learned before.
Her admiration for Matisse was a constant encouragement and inspiration during the 1980's and in the summer of 1983 she flew out to Russia on holiday to visit the Hermitage and see the Matisse's and other French art in the state collection. Ever willing to expand her knowledge Rose Hilton enrolled for Cecil Collins' drawing classes the following year at the Central School of Art. She stated that she gained a lot of confidence from these classes and her drawing freed up and moved away from the more formal approach she had until that time. It seemed that in her later years she became free in her work bringing another dimension to it.
