Derek Hill's death was not unexpected. He had been in poor health for some months and it was obvious that his sheer appetite for life and people was at last beginning to fail.
So Tory Island - his favourite retreat - will never see him again. The studio-home in Donegal is now tenantless and the house in Hampstead where he sat and painted among paintings, stacked one against another, will no longer hear his step or his unmistakable voice.
Hill was not merely an excellent (and still rather underrated) painter; he was an outsize personality who had a genius for friendship. He had so many parts they almost seem self-contradictory.
Who else could have been a successful portraitist, an outstanding landscapist, a recognised scholar of Islamic art and architecture, a world traveller, a devoted art collector, a public benefactor (particularly of Ireland, his adopted country), a patron of young artists, an able writer, a gifted stage designer, a very knowledgeable gardener, a famous host and raconteur and an organiser of exhibitions all in one?
His friendships included so many fellow artists, writers, social celebrities, musicians, stage people, politicians, explorers, academics and intellectuals that together their names would read like an artistic and social register of two or three continents.
Hill the portrait painter is represented in many collections, including the National Portrait Gallery in London which owns his paintings of the writer L.P. Hartley and the actor Alec Guinness. Hundreds more hang in private houses in Britain, Ireland and the US.
All his life Hill was a celebrity-collector. Yet they gravitated towards him of their own accord, drawn as much by the charm and force of his personality as by his professional skills.
His early friendship with Bernard Berenson, for instance, grew naturally and for a time he lived in a small house in the grounds of Berenson's house in Italy, painting and profiting by the great scholar's talk and tuition.
He painted Berenson during his last months, lying back in bed while being read to by his mistress-muse, Nicky Mariano. To my knowledge he did not paint Matisse, to whom he was sent by Dorothy Bussy (sister of Lytton Strachey) and her husband, the gifted French pastelist Simon Bussy.
Otherwise, it is hard to think of many well-known personalities whom Hill did not paint. His sitters included Seamus Heaney, Arthur Rubinstein the pianist, the historian Steven Runciman, John Betjeman, Isaiah Berlin, Wilfred Thesiger, Erskine Childers, Garret FitzGerald, Tony O'Reilly, Anne Crookshank, Archbishop McQuaid of Dublin, the Duchess of Abercorn, the Tory Island painter James Dixon, et alii multi.
Those who liked to poke fun gently at Hill for his cherished intimacy with the British royal family might remember that he was just as likely to paint some Tory Island boatman or a small farmer in the area of Church Hill, the district in Donegal where he lived for much of the year. He was too big a man to be a social snob and his friendships embraced all sorts of people.
He sometimes became a little sensitive that many people preferred his landscapes and excellent small genre pieces to the portraits since this implied that the latter were painted for pleasure and the former to make a living. Hill was, of course, a professional portrait-painter but he generally chose his sitters and was inimical to painting people who did not interest him.
Overall, the portraits are uneven in quality but the best of them are outstanding and show not only his excellent technique but his insight into character. In an epoch in which portraiture was either neglected or left to poorly-talented academicians, he kept a great tradition alive .
The small landscapes - his "postcard masterpieces" - are unfailingly good. Yet some of the larger ones are also masterpieces, including the big view of Tory Island in the Ulster Museum, Belfast, and Donegal, Late Harvest, which shows a scene near his beloved Church Hill.
These two pictures would be sufficient to place Hill among the great landscape painters. And his small, deceptively "spontaneous" pictures of musicians in action, or Greek Orthodox monks at Mount Athos or the clothesline in his garden are excellent.
His reputation as an artist seems secure and will grow with time and greater public familiarity. As for the man himself, he was so rich and kaleidoscopic a personality that only the combined reminiscences of his uncounted friends and extended family could describe him in the round. He seemed to know or have known just about everybody and could relate facts or anecdotes about them.
Visitors to the house in Church Hill were asked to sign a visitors' book and once when my wife and I arrived there for a few days we noted the name Greta Garbo, dated some days previously.
"What was she like as a guest, Derek?" I asked.
"Oh," he answered, "she didn't do very much except eat apples and go for walks on her own."
Hill was not afraid of dying. "Probably it will be just like going on a trip to Tory Island."
He also mentioned that he had finally finished, with a little help, writing his memoirs, and I can only hope they preserve some of the essence of a unique personality.