Born to British parents, Charles Hinton attended public school in Clapham, England. He returned to New York City for his early art training, at the Cooper Union and the National Academy. In 1892 he won the Academy's Hallgarten Traveling Scholarship. It enabled him to study in Paris under Jean-Léon Gérôme at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, at the Académie Julian, and with William-Adolphe Bouguereau.
On his return to the United States in 1901, Hinton began teaching drawing and illustration at the National Academy. In 1938 he became dean of the Academy school, a position he held until 1948. The artist and historian of the Academy Eliot Clark remembered Hinton as "bringing to the school a continuity of administration, a faithful counselor, and a capable instructor."
Hinton began showing his work at the Academy in 1892 and exhibited there almost every year from 1906 to 1940. He is best known for his designs for commemorative medals honoring Charles Lindbergh and Abraham Lincoln. Besides being a sculptor, he was a prodigious painter, specializing in murals, several of which he did for the city of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Further evidence of his artistic versatility are his many book and magazine illustrations. In about 1912 Hinton moved to Bronxville in Westchester County, New York, to join the growing art community forming there around the painter Will H. Low.
Hinton was a member of the National Sculpture Society and the Century Association, both in New York.
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