Sculptor born in Cardiff, the third son of John Hill, a merchant, and his wife, Lauretta (née Elliott). He studied at the Royal College of Art under Edouard Lantéri. A decorative panel he had submitted for a college exercise on the subject of ‘Art’ was illustrated in the Arts & Crafts Magazine, 1904. In the following year, he was one of the sculpture students selected by Lantéri to execute a figure, in his case, John Constable, for Aston Webb’s new façade of the Victoria and Albert Museum. In 1906, while Hill was still a student (he would graduate in February 1908), Lantéri seconded Goscombe John’s nomination for Hill’s membership of the Society (later Royal Society) of British Sculptors. Hill exhibited at the Royal Academy only once, in 1908 (with No. 1823, Homer – relief), giving his address as 29 Mimosa Street, Fulham, west London. At the time of the 1911 census, he was lodging in Margate, Kent, and teaching modelling at a local school of art. He married Grace Emily Hall in August 1914, at which time both he and his wife were living at Kew, south London. By the 1920s, the couple had moved to Beverley, Yorkshire, and in 1921 Hill carved the four seated figures around the base of R.H. Whiteing’s Beverley War Memorial. Nothing more is known of his work as a sculptor. According to Mapping Sculpture, he was a member of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society in c.1946 and retired from the Royal Society of British Sculptors in 1967. This makes it probable that he is the Vincent Hill whose death was registered in the second quarter of the following year in Deben Rural District, Suffolk – his age, 88, being consistent with the registration date for the sculptor’s birth in the third quarter of 1879. One further record may be relevant. If, like many figurative sculptors in the 1930s, Hill was finding little work in this line, it is not inconceivable that he turned to painting to earn his living, and therefore may be the Vincent Hill, staying at Findon, West Sussex, at the time of the 1939 Register, who is described as an ‘artist (painter)’, working on his own account, who was born on 2 June 1879.
Ancestry website sources: England and Wales, Civil Registration Birth Index, 1879, Q3; Wales Censuses: 1881, 1891, 1901; England Censuses: 1911, 1921; Surrey … Church of England Marriages and Banns … Kew, St Anne. 1914–1918; 1939 England and Wales Register; England and Wales, Civil Registration Death Index … 1968, Q2.
Bibliography: G. Archer, The Glorious Dead. Figurative Sculpture of British First World War Memorials, Kirstead, Norfolk, 2009, p. 249, pls. 219, 220; T. Cavanagh, Public Sculpture of Kensington and Chelsea with Westminster South-West, Watford, 2023, p. 168; IWM War Memorials Register: Beverley; Mapping Sculpture; J. Physick, The Victoria and Albert Museum. The history of its building, London, 1982, pp. 229, 230; Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, 1769–2018 – a Chronicle. Index.
Terry Cavanagh November 2022; revised, February 2026