He built a successful career in shipping and, along with a family inheritance, used his moderate wealth to support waves of Australian artists in the first half of the twentieth century.

As a young man Hinton was rather plump, pink, short-sighted, wearing very thick optical lenses, diffident in manner, shy, and he "only really dropped his guard with his closest friends.

Then, in 1904, his firm gave him charge of a speculative venture to take a refurbished steamer, the Macquarie, to the Far East carrying wheat, wool, oats and paying passengers to Yokohama during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905.

Sixty-two pages of diary entries and four photographic albums give detailed record of these exotic years: trading, sightseeing and dining between ports in Japan, China, Hong Kong and Vietnam.

[2]: 278 When his firm was reconstituted in 1908 as the McArthur Shipping & Agency Co. Ltd., Hinton remained with the company, thus spending his entire working life in Australia with the one business, rising to directorship in 1916 and enjoying moderate wealth.

[2] Immediately after migrating to Australia in 1890 Hinton made friends with artists including Julian Ashton, Livingston Hopkins, Tom Roberts, Albert Henry Fullwood, Vic Mann and Arthur Streeton.

He was a frequent visitor to and sometime inhabitant of several of the artists' camps set up on the foreshores of Sydney harbour,[4] and began buying paintings.

He continued giving to the gallery and was made a trustee in 1919, a position he held till his death in 1948, by which time he had donated 122 pictures including important works by E. Phillips Fox, Elioth Gruner, George Lambert, Roberts and Streeton.

From 1931 paintings began to arrive regularly at the college, including those by the European artists declined by the National Art Gallery of New South Wales.

In that year he also presented a Declaration of Trust through the Crown Solicitor to the Armidale Teachers' College, formally stating the terms of his continuing gift.

Hinton made eight more visits to the Teachers' College in the ensuing years, and formed a close relationship with the first Principal, C. B. Newling, with whom he kept up written correspondence.

[11] Hinton has been described by Arthur Streeton and Norman Lindsay as one of Australia's great art benefactors alongside Alfred Felton, David Scott Mitchell and Sir Baldwin Spencer.

[12] By the end of his life in 1948 he had donated over a thousand works to the Teachers' College in Armidale representing the work of hundreds of Australian artists including Arthur Streeton, Tom Roberts, Nora Heysen, Hans Heysen, Elioth Gruner, Margaret Preston, William Dobell, Adrian Feint, Ethel Spowers, Roy De Maistre, Thea Proctor, Lloyd Rees, Lance Solomon, and the Lindsay family.

Barry Pearce, former head curator of Australian Art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales described the Hinton donation as including "many magnificent Australian landscapes by a range of major and minor artists ... crowned by such masterpieces as Arthur Streeton's Morning Sketch (aka McMahon's Point Ferry) 1890 and Near Streeton's camp at Sirius Cove, 1892 and, the jewel in the crown, Mosman's Bay, 1894 by Tom Roberts.

By the 1970s it was evident that the valuable and significant works donated by Hinton required levels of secure housing, curatorship, preservation and environmental management not available within the open doors and corridors of a public college.

[15] NERAM now houses the Hinton Collection and in February 2018 a permanent exhibition, Hinton: Treasures of Australian art (https://www.hinton.neram.com.au/the-collection), featuring over a hundred and thirty of the most iconic works from the collection, was opened in the museum's East Gallery by former Director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Edmund Capon.