Tristram Hillier
British painter (1905–1983)
Tristram Paul Hillier (11 April 1905 – 18 January 1983) was an English surrealist painter. He was a member of the Unit One group led by Paul Nash.
Early life and education
Tristram Hillier was born on 11 April 1905 in Beijing, China, the youngest of the four children of Edward Guy Hillier (1857–1924), a banker and diplomat, and Ada Everett. His elder siblings were Winifred, Maurice and Madeline. In 1906, he ‘came to Europe from Peking for the first time at the age of six months in the company of my mother, my brother and [two] sisters, a Japanese ‘Amah’ and two Chinese servants’. The Amah was Tuk-San, a Roman Catholic convert, who was "the real influence in my life then and for many years later... and meant more to me ...than my own mother.
A Roman Catholic, he was educated at Downside School. In 1922 he returned to China to study the language, and visit his sister Madeline and Tuk-San and then until 1924 attended Christ's College, Cambridge. He went to the Slade in 1926, where he studied under Henry Tonks, and then to Paris where he studied for two years under André Lhote, and also at the Atelier Colarossi.
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This entry incorporates text from “Tristram Hillier” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.