"Riding out of Yosemite" by Thomas Hill

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"Riding out of Yosemite" by Thomas Hill

About the Item

An important figure in the tradition of landscape painting in California, Thomas Hill garnered widespread acclaim for his portrayals of the Yosemite Valley. However, his artistic activity was not restricted to the depiction of the American West; indeed, Hill was also among the Hudson River School painters who drew inspiration from the White Mountains of New Hampshire. A versatile artist known for his keen powers of observation, his oeuvre also includes portraits, still lifes and genre scenes. Hill was born in Birmingham, England, on September 11th 1829, the son of Thomas Hill, a tailor, and his wife, Maria. As a boy growing up in Smethcott, Salop County (Shropshire), and in Wolverhampton, he developed an interest in oil painting. In 1844, his family left England and settled in Taunton, Massachusetts. Instead of continuing his schooling, Hill worked for a carriage painter and furniture decorator in Taunton before moving to Boston in 1847. There, he continued his decorating work until 1853, when he enrolled in life classes under Peter Rothermel at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Throughout this period, Hill spent most of his time creating still lifes and portraits. In 1854 he made his first painting trip to the White Mountains of New Hampshire, accompanied by his friend and fellow artist, Benjamin Champney. A year later he moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, and for several years thereafter made seasonal visits to the White Mountains with a group of landscapists that included Champney, Asher B. Durand, Albert Bierstadt, George Inness and others. In 1858, Hill moved to Chelsea, Massachusetts, where he decorated furniture for the Heywood-Wakefield Company in Gardner, Massachusetts, and painted in his spare time. A pivotal moment in Hill’s career occurred in 1861 when, seeking a temperate climate in which to recover from a bout of tuberculosis, he settled in San Francisco. In the following year he made his first visit to Yosemite with the painters Virgil Williams and William Keith, a trip that inspired many of his later landscapes. Hill went on to paint portraits and landscapes that he exhibited in San Francisco, New York and elsewhere. In 1866 he spent six months in Paris studying with the German painter Paul Meyerheim, who, after seeing some sketches Hill had made at Fontainebleau, advised him to make landscape painting his forte. Hill went on to work in a style in which he combined the mid-century emphasis on realism with the painterly handling and textured surfaces of the Barbizon School, imbuing his paintings with a greater expressivity than his counterparts in the East. Hill resided in Boston from 1868 to 1870, during which time he painted landscapes after sketches he had made during his earlier sojourn in California. One such work, Yosemite Valley, was exhibited at Childs Gallery in Boston to considerable acclaim; it was subsequently reproduced as a chromolithograph by Louis Prang and Company and engraved for the frontispiece of James Mason Hutching’s book, Scenes of Wonder and Curiosity in California (1870). Hill returned to San Francisco in 1871, going on to work out of a studio in the Tucker Building. By the mid-1870s, he was well established in regional and national art circles, exhibiting his landscapes at venues on both coasts and selling them to affluent California collectors such as railroad magnate Charles Crocker, banker William C. Ralston and Governor Leland Stanford.1 Hill’s numerous awards and honors included a bronze medal at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia (1876) and the Temple Medal of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1884). An important figure in the San Francisco art scene, Hill helped organize the San Francisco Art Association, was a member of the San Francisco Bohemian Club, and at one point owned an art store with a Beaux-Arts gallery on Post Street where he promoted his own work and that of other painters. Along with Virgil Williams, he helped found the California School of Design in 1874. Hill remained in San Francisco until 1879, when, having sold his gallery due to an economic downturn, he bought a twenty-room house in Seminary Park, Oakland. In 1883 he built a summer studio in the Yosemite Valley that was destroyed by a windstorm shortly thereafter. After selling his Oakland mansion in 1886, Hill set up his studio next to the Wawona Hotel, twenty-five miles south of Yosemite, going on to sell many of his landscapes to visiting tourists. He painted in the White Mountains during the summers of 1880 and 1892 and in the autumn of 1886, and in 1887 he traveled to Alaska to paint a view of the Muir Glacier for the naturalist, John Muir. During the early 1890s, Hill began spending his winters in Raymond, California. In 1896, Hill suffered the first of a series of strokes that caused him to curtail his painting activity. He went on to divide his time between Wawona and Raymond and took vacation trips to Mexico, Coronado Beach, Monterey and San Francisco. Poor health caused him to stop painting altogether in 1905. He died in Raymond on June 30th 1908. Hill’s sons, Edward Rufus Hill (1852-1908) and Thomas Virgil Troyon Hill (1871-1922), were also painters. Hill is represented in public collections throughout the United States, including the Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the New-York Historical Society; the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia; the Oakland Museum of California; the Phoenix Art Museum; the M. H. de Young Museum, San Francisco; the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California; Stanford University Museum of Art, Stanford, California; the West Point Museum, West Point, New York; the White House, Washington, D.C.; and the Yosemite Museum, Yosemite National Park, California.

Creator:
Thomas Hill (Painter)
Dimensions:
Height: 36 in (91.44 cm)Width: 54 in (137.16 cm)
Style:
American Classical (Of the Period)
Materials and Techniques:
Canvas
Place of Origin:
United States
Period:
19th Century
Date of Manufacture:
1880
Condition:
Seller Location:
Wiscasset, ME
Reference Number:
1stDibs: LU101761162786

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Thomas Hill

Immigrating from England in 1844, Thomas Hill came to America with his family as a youngster, and became one of America's most famous 19th-century landscape painter, especially of panoramic views of the Sierra Nevada Mountains and Yosemite. He also painted landscapes of the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone National Park, where he was particularly fascinated by the geysers. Hill studied art in Philadelphia at the Pennsylvania Academy, and his first intentions were to become a history painter. However, he changed to landscape when he spent time in Europe, especially France among the Barbizon painters and in the studio of Paul Meyerheim. During the 1870s and 1880s, his work brought high prices, but diminished with the increasing popularity of modernism. In the latter half of the 20th century, his work was rediscovered, and he is now considered one of the major figures in American art. He settled with his family in Taunton, Massachusetts and worked in Boston with a carriage maker. He studied with Peter Rothermel at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and painted in Massachusetts and New Hampshire with George Inness, Asher Durand, Virgil Williams, Albert Bierstadt, and his brother, Edward Hill. Experiencing health problems with the cold, wet New England climate, Hill moved his family back to San Francisco in 1871. He hit his artistic stride in California during the 1870s, beginning with his first grandiose painting, The Yosemite Valley, which was published as a chromolithograph by Prang. With Frederic Whymper, Hill was a founding member of the San Francisco Art Association, and in 1873, he became a member of the Bohemian Club, a men's organization dedicated to cultural enhancement. Hill's paintings continued to bring higher prices in the 1870s, and he was a wealthy man by 1878. Soon thereafter, however, hard times fell upon the artist, as they did on the San Francisco economy and art market in general. He struggled through the next decade, moving back and forth to paint in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, and his beloved Yosemite Valley in California. During these years he was still acclaimed but experienced increasing financial distress. Also his marriage was not happy, which led him to spend more and more time in Yosemite. When his long-time friend and fellow artist Virgil Williams, director of the California School of Fine Arts, died in 1886, Hill agreed to take over as a director without compensation. By the following summer, however, running the school had become more than he could handle. Hill left his position at the School of Fine Arts in San Francisco in the summer of 1887, and took off on a cruise to Alaska that resulted in a number of Alaska and Canadian coastal pictures. He also spent a winter in New Orleans, creating large studio paintings. Hill's fortunes continued to vacillate until 1896 when he suffered the first of a series of strokes from which he never fully recovered. He died in 1908.