18 Facts About Adrian Hill

Adrian Keith Graham Hill was a British artist, writer, art therapist, educator and broadcaster.

Adrian Hill wrote many books about painting and drawing, and in the 1950s and early 1960s presented a BBC children's television programme called Sketch Club.

Adrian Hill was born in Charlton, London, and educated at Dulwich College.

Adrian Hill went on to study at the St John's Wood Art School between 1912 and 1914.

At the start of World War I Adrian Hill enlisted with the Honourable Artillery Company and, due to his artistic abilities was assigned to a Scouting and Sniping Section.

Later in life, Adrian Hill recalled a typical such patrol into no man's land:.

In 1917 Adrian Hill became the first artist commissioned by the, then newly created, Imperial War Museum to record scenes on the Western Front.

Between 1917 and 1919 Adrian Hill produced 180 pen-and-ink drawings showing the examples of the devastation in France and Belgium and the work of troops of different nationalities in the trenches.

On returning to civilian life, Adrian Hill completed his studies at the Royal College of Art and then painted professionally for a living.

Adrian Hill taught at both the Hornsey School of Art and the Westminster School of Art.

In 1939, occupational therapy was introduced to the sanatorium for the first time and Adrian Hill was invited to teach drawing and painting to other patients - at first to injured soldiers returning from the war, and then to general civilian patients.

Adrian Hill found that the practice of Art seemed to help to divert the patients and to relieve their mental distress.

Adrian Hill believed that art appreciation aided recovery from illness and was involved, with the British Red Cross Society, in setting up a scheme whereby reproductions of famous artists' works were lent to hospital wards all over the country.

Adrian Hill worked tirelessly to promote art therapy, eventually becoming president of the British Association of Art Therapists, founded in 1964, though he found himself at odds with its increasingly psychoanalytical orientation.

In 1968 Adrian Hill was elected president of the Royal Institute of Oil Painters.

Adrian Hill apparently coined the term "art therapy" in 1942, and in 1945 published his ideas in the book Art Versus Illness.

Adrian Hill thought that when the patient's physical resistance was at its lowest this somehow rendered the "animal ego" quiescent and allowed the creative powers of the "spiritual essence" to come through in works of art.

Adrian Hill saw art therapy as becoming an integral part of the National Health Service.