Biography
Born
1905
Died
1983
Nationality
English
Birth place
Pekin
Hillier was born in Pekin, China but his family moved to England soon after his birth. He studied at Cambridge University for two years and was subsequently apprenticed to a firm of chartered accountants. However this career was quickly abandoned, when he decided to study at the Slade School of Fine Art from 1926. Until 1940 Hillier spent a great deal of time in France but retained strong links with London. In 1933 he joined the modernist group, 'Unit One'. Hillier developed his distinctive style in the mid-1930s, combining a precise style of painting with a sense of stillness evoking the strangeness of Surrealism.