In June 1973 Hilton's late gouaches were shown for the first time in an exhibition which took place in Penzance at the Orion Gallery and a few months later in March 1974 more were included in Hilton's retrospective at the Serpentine Gallery. Oscillating between the apparently abstract and a form of symbolic figuration these works, according to Adrian Lewis: `share a dialectic of winsomeness and resistance to easy consumption, figurative readability and opaqueness to penetration, discursive movement beyond the image and focus back upon the material and formal constitution of the artwork.' The results `should be seen as images constructed to represent his personal reality and dreamwork rather than transparent reflections of his domestic circumstances..' Adrian Lewis, The Last Days of Hilton, 1996.

Composition with Yellow and Pink, with its suggestion of leaves, is a joyful example of one of the leitmotifs of these late gouaches identified by Lewis: `the double-arc form appears constantly in Hilton's late gouaches and earlier oils, often evoking cleavage or rhyming with wing or landscape forms. one of Hilton's impulses was clearly to transfigure formal elements into an embodiment of his existential situation. Indeed Hilton's figurating in his late work is (like Guston's) as `modernist' as his abstractions.'