Alexander Stuart-Hill


Alexander Stuart-Hill was a Scottish portrait and landscape artist who lived in Paris who was engaged to Princess Louise of Battenberg before her marriage to King Gustaf VI Adolf.

Early life

Stuart-Hill was born in 1889 was born in Perth, Scotland. His father, William Hill, was a fishmonger.
He studied at Edinburgh College of Art, where he was awarded a scholarship that allowed him to travel around France, Italy and Spain.

Career

From 1920 to 1947, Stuart-Hill regularly exhibited portraits and landscapes at the Royal Academy of Arts. He showed at the Grosvenor Gallery with the Royal Society of Portrait Painters, and at the New Chenil Galleries in Chelsea. In 1932, he designed a poster for Shell with Vorticist overtones which showed Mousehole, Penzance. In 1937, the Redfern Gallery held a one-man exhibition of his portraits and views of London bridges, including Battersea Bridge and The Thames at Charing Cross Bridge. In 1943, he designed another poster for London Transport that featured bridges over the Thames.
His portrait subjects included The Duchesse de Choiseuil-Praslin, Lilias Livingstone Mackinnon, Admiral Sir H. Goodenough King-Hall, Arthur Greenhow Lupton, First Pro-Chancellor of the University of Leeds, Turner Layton, Florence Mills, and the Baroness Posznanska.
He landscape subjects focused on his native Scotland as well as other parts of Europe, including views of Santa Margherita, Italy –1928) and Early Spring Sunshine in Amalfi. In Perth, he painted The Tay in Sunshine, Kinnoull Hill, and the Cottage at Burghmuir.

Personal life

During World War I, Stuart-Hill worked in a military hospital in Nevers where he began a relationship with fellow volunteer Lady Louise Mountbatten. She was a daughter of Prince Louis of Battenberg, an admiral in the British Royal Navy who renounced his German title during the First World War and anglicised the family name to "Mountbatten" at the behest of King George V in 1917. Louise's mother was Princess Victoria of Hesse and by Rhine, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, and she was a sister of Louis Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma, and of Princess Alice of Battenberg. She was also a niece of Empress Alexandra Feodorovna of Russia. Anticipating that her parents would be disappointed in the choice, Louise kept their engagement a secret for two years. Eventually, she confided in her parents, who were initially understanding, and twice invited him for visits at Kent House at East Cowes on the Isle of Wight. Her family, referring to him as "Shakespeare" because of his odd appearance, found him "eccentric" and "". Lacking resources, the engaged couple agreed to postpone marriage until after the war. But in 1918, Louise's father explained to her that Stuart-Hill was most likely homosexual, and that a marriage with him was impossible. In 1923, Louise later married Crown Prince Gustaf Adolf of Sweden and upon his ascension to the Swedish throne in 1950, she became Queen consort of Sweden.
According to his obituary in The Times, besides painting, "there was nothing "Stuart" could not do with his hands, from building chimneys and repairing roofs to the most delicate work in petit-point embroidery." His studio, located at 41 Glebe Place in Chelsea, was a "lively social meeting place in the years before the Second World War." Attendees included members of the Bright young things, including Evelyn Waugh, Florence Mills, Alice Delysia, Turner Layton, and Clarence “Tandy” Johnstone.
Stuart-Hill died in February 1948.

Legacy

Today, his works are in the collections of the Perth Museum and Art Gallery, the Imperial War Museum, Dundee Art Galleries and Museums Collection, the Ulster Museum, The Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery, and the Perth and Kinross Council.