Knight has illustrated for a wide variety of clients, creating artwork for magazines, children's fashion advertisements, greeting cards, record albums as well as posters and music album covers for Broadway musicals, including Gypsy, Irene (1973), Half A Sixpence, Hallelujah Baby!, and No, No, Nanette (1971).
Living in Roslyn, New York, as a child, Hilary was age six when he moved to Manhattan with his family.
I know he has influenced my style.After study with George Grosz and Reginald Marsh at the Art Students League, Knight labored as a ship painter while serving in the U.S. Navy from 1944 to 1946.
[5] His work as a humorous illustrator was strongly influenced by the British cartoonist and satirist Ronald Searle.
Thompson and Knight teamed to create another sequel, Eloise Takes a Bawth, working with children's book editor Ursula Nordstrom.
[11] It was an action that deprived her collaborator of income for decades (a situation that changed with Thompson's death in 1998).
[12] In Salon, Amy Benfer speculated on Thompson's motives in "Will the real Eloise please stand up?"
In addition to creating children's picture books—among them, in collaboration with poet Margaret Fishback, A Child's Book of Natural History (1969),[16] a revision and extension of A Child's Primer of Natural History by Oliver Herford—Knight has illustrated for other genres, such as Peg Bracken's The I Hate to Cook Book.
[17] The roll call of artists Knight admires includes Ludwig Bemelmans, Joseph Hirsch, Leo Lionni, Robert Vickrey, and Garth Williams.
His 1964 book Where's Wallace?, featuring an orangutan that kept escaping from the zoo to visit different places such as a circus, museum, department store, beach etc.
[6] Shows he created the poster artwork for include: No, No, Nanette (1971), Good News (1974), Gypsy (1974), I Love My Wife (1977), Ain’t Misbehavin’ (1978), Whoopee!
He is represented by two galleries—the Giraffics Gallery (East Hampton, New York) and Every Picture Tells a Story (Santa Monica, California).