Intellectually and philosophically, Jerome Hill was a humanist. He never stopped learning nor did he ever stop sharing what he learned. Although he was apt to appear for dinner in a pair of ancient corduroys and a well-worn tweed jacket, somehow one remembers him as a princely man. Princely in fortune to be sure. But princely also in his legendary generosity, in his searching, eclectic turn of mind and above all, in his abiding devotion to the arts.

Hill was born in St. Paul, Minnesota on March 2, 1905. As the grandson and namesake of the successful railroad builder, James Jerome Hill, who hammered out the Great Northern Railroad system in the late 1800's, young Jerome, along with his brothers and his sister, were guaranteed a protected and economically secure childhood.

The family's large town house was adorned with splendid examples of the art of the day - Corot, Delacroix, Rousseau, the Barbizon School, etc. And Jerome's father, Louis, was an enthusiastic amateur painter who was known to turn out rather better than respectable examples of the Corot genre. For a child blessed with more than his share of manual and mental dexterity it is not surprising that drawing and painting became a major preoccupation throughout the whole of Jerome Hill's life.

After he graduated from Yale University in 1927 with a baccalaureate in music, Hill decided to delve further into the arcane mysteries of painting. He consumed and was much influenced by the writings of Clive Bell and Roger Fry. From Yale he took himself off to his beloved city of Rome, where he studied at the British Academy during 1928. He then went to the Academie Scandinave in Paris, where, until 1932, he was guided and coached by a galaxy of contemporary artists, among whom were de Segonzac, Dufresne, Gromaire, Marquet and Friesz. It was here, undoubtedly, that Hill began to develop the sharp, selective eye that would serve him so well as a collector in later years.

Perhaps the most remarkable fact about Jerome Hill is that he became proficient in not one but in three demanding disciplines: music, painting and more importantly for him, the latter-day art of the motion picture. A less perceptive, less talented man, given similar circumstances, might easily have drifted off into a perfunctory career as a nimble dilettante. But such a course was not his way. He was a prodigious worker and a very serious one. Those who knew him would be hard put to recall a single moment during his life when his seemingly demonic energies were not surging into some project or other. Wherever he lived, a palette, a piano or a camera was near at hand - not merely to tinker with, but to serve as instruments for creative action. At times one wondered if he ever slept at all.

A few highlights are characteristic. In 1968, Hill composed accompaniments for the poems of the Countess Ophelia de Rouget, subsequently broadcast by the Swiss National Radio. In May 1971, his compositions for harpsichord and chamber orchestra were played in full concert at the Basilica di Santa Cecilia in Rome. The performance was conducted by Miles Morgan, great-grandson of J.P. Morgan, and one local newspaper headlined its review "Hill's Music Unabashedly Classical." In September 1975, the celebrated organist, Edouard Nies-Berger, who collaborated with Albert Schweitzer on a new edition of Bach's music for the organ, played a transcription of Hill's works at a memorial concert in Gunsbach in Alsace, honoring the 100th anniversary of Schweitzer's birth.

Hill's paintings were widely appreciated. His canvases were exhibited in the Salon des Tuileries and the Salon d'Automne in Paris at various intervals between 1929 and 1937. After the war, he had several one-man shows in both New York and Rome. In America, his work is represented in the collections of the Minnesota Museum of Art in St. Paul, The Minneapolis Institute of Arts as well as in many private collections around the nation.

In the world of the cinema, Hill's film biography "Grandma Moses" was nominated for the Academy Award in 1950, and his feature length documentary "Albert Schweitzer" won that same award in 1958. Many leaders in the field of avant-garde film making considered him a formidable talent. In addition to the films named above, he had produced, by the time he died in 1972, no less than ten others, including a brilliant autobiographical study called "Film Portrait." Here, all three of Jerome Hill's main proclivities came together; he painted the animated sequences frame by frame, he stretched the optical potential of the camera to new dimensions, and he wrote and scored the music for the sound track. A reviewer for the New York Times called "Film Portrait" the "Charming Swan Song of an Experimentalist."

If all this suggests that Jerome Hill was a recluse, denying himself the usual pleasures of life to labour in the solitude of one of his several retreats, no such conclusion would be more mistaken. On the contrary, he was a witty, eloquent and warmly gregarious man. He loved and knew a lot about good food and wine. He adored flowers, parlour games and popular music. He was an exuberant skier, a fine swimmer and an agile ball-room dancer with particular expertise in such exotic rhythms as "The Lindy Hop." He had an astonishing memory for dates, places, songs and people. He was fluent in French (which he claimed he spoke better than English), German and Italian. He spoke and read Russian well enough to travel there without an interpreter, and, for almost five years before he died, he studied Chinese.

Apart form all this, Hill maintained what must be fairly called a monetary rescue service for his less fortunate friends. Quietly, unobtrusively, often anonymously, he helped purchase, or simply gave away houses, put newly-weds on their feet, found jobs, paid legal fees, school tuitions, medical bills, even food bills. He put money into plays, encouraged young artists by buying their works outright or supplying them with direct support. He helped finance the Salzburg Seminar in 1948 and he was the founding patron of Anthology Film Archives, a unique New York repository for the study of avant-garde films from the earliest known experiments to the latest contemporary efforts.

But without doubt Jerome Hill's most important and imaginative philanthropic act came in 1967 with the establishment of the Camargo Foundation which he endowed with his art collection, his library and his land holdings in California and in France. The Foundation, a New York charitable trust, provides fellowships for scholars who wish to pursue further studies in various branches of French culture in France - an opportunity Hill himself might have appreciated during his own student years.

The physical site of the Camargo Foundation is located on Hill's former estate in Cassis, France, an ancient Mediterranean fishing port about twenty kilometers east of Marseilles. The main house on the property is called "La Batterie," because a young artillery officer named Napoleon Bonaparte once mounted his cannon on the cliff to protect the approaches to Marseilles and the lovely crescent-shaped harbour below. During the early thirties Hill made frequent sketching trips to Cassis, finally succumbing to the magic of the place when he bought the estate in 1939. As a Lieutenant of the U.S. Air Force in World War II, and a diligent liaison officer with the reconstituted French Air Command, Hill had little time to fret about the war-time condition of his treasured sanctuary. Finally, however, he and a few sympathetic companions got leave to visit Cassis in August 1945. They found that beyond a hastily deserted anti-aircraft emplacement dug into the terrace, the property had survived the Nazi occupation more or less unharmed.

The retreating Germans had theorized, however, that in order to utilize the roads over the Luberon massif, an Allied force might well come ashore in Cassis. Consequently, they scuttled two large Mediterranean cruse ships across the mouth of the harbour and, at the time, these brutal hulks ravaged one of La Batterie's most precious assets - the breathtaking view across the bay to the mighty face of the great Cap Canaille.

The wrecked ships are now only a memory, so once again, visitors may sit hypnotized by the same scene Napoleon gazed out upon as he sat pondering his future in "Le Petit Cabanon," the little stone hut that remains intact. It is the same view that bewitched Winston Churchill when he took painting lessons from a certain Miss Oliver, an English lady who formerly lived on the estate. And of course, it is also the panorama that cast its timeless spell on Jerome Hill and his grateful friends for nearly thirty-five years.

Francis Brennan