Charles C. Hill

After working as a lecturer at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto,^[4] teaching the history of Canadian art (1970–1971), he was hired by the National Gallery of Canada to work in the library, then as the assistant curator of Post-Confederation art in 1972.^[3] In 1980, he was made the National Gallery curator of the permanent collection of Canadian art up to 1970, in charge of its care, installation and development.

In his work as a curator, he organized such important, ground-breaking exhibitions accompanied by major book catalogues as Canadian Painting in the 30s (1975),^[3] Morrice A Gift to the Nation The G. Blair Laing Collection (1992); The Group of Seven: Art for a Nation (1995), (with Dennis Reid) Tom Thomson, (2002), (with Johanne Lamoureaux and others) Emily Carr: New Perspectives on a Canadian Icon (2006), and Artists, Architects and Artisans 1890–1918 (2013)^[5][6] as well as co-authoring with Pierre B. Landry Catalogue of the National Gallery of Canada Ottawa Canadian Art Volume One A – F.^[4] Among his other shows are To Found a National Gallery: the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, 1880–1919 (1980). He also lectured widely on his exhibitions.^[7] In 1920, the National Gallery of Canada Review published his article titled "Portraits of Canadian Artists, Architects, and Writers: The Photographs of Edmond Dyonnet, 1891–1915".^[8]

Hill counts among his major acquisitions Emily Carr's The Welcome Man, the gift of Bryan Adams, and Charles Comfort's The Romance of Nickle, given by Natural Resources Canada.^[9][10] He had been at the National Gallery 47 years when he retired in 2014.

In 2001, he was made a member of the Order of Canada. He received an honorary doctorate from Concordia University in Montreal in 2002.^[11]

He was the first president of the University of the Toronto Homophile Association (1969), was a co-organizer of the first large-scale gay rights demonstration in Canada, We Demand (1972),^[6] and became president of Gays of Ottawa the same year, until 1975.^[12] His portrait hangs in the National Portrait Collection of The ArQuives.

His long-term partner is Brian Foss, professor of art history and until 2021 director of Carleton University's School for Studies in Art and Culture.^[6]

• Fulford, Robert (1995). "Charles Hill: Regrouping the Group of Seven" (PDF). Canadian Art. Retrieved 23 November 2020.
• Jessup, Lynda (1996). "Art for a Nation?". Fuse Magazine (summer 1996): 11–14. ISBN 9780773590960. Retrieved 24 November 2020.
• Lacroix, Laurier (2010). "Writing art history in the Twentieth Century", The Visual Arts in Canada: the Twentieth Century. Foss, Brian., Paikowsky, Sandra., Whitelaw, Anne (eds.). Don Mills, Ont.: Oxford University Press. p. 173. ISBN 978-0-19-542125-5. OCLC 432401392.