Located in San Antonio, TX
John William Hilton
(1904 - 1983)
California Artist
Image Size: 18 x 24
Frame Size: 26.5 x 32.5
Medium: Oil on Panel
"Navajo Medicine Man"
Biography
John William Hilton (1904 - 1983)
Born in Carrington, North Dakota, John Hilton is known for desert landscape painting as well as scenes with cowboys, horses, and cattle. He was also a poet, musician, geologist, miner, and entertainer.
His father was a baker, and the family lived in a shack on a farm. When he was four, he went to China with his mother and father, who became a missionary. There he met Chinese bandits, philosophers, and walked along the Great Wall by the time he was age 10. The family was separated during the Sun Yat Sen revolution, and thinking the father was dead, the mother returned to North Dakota where the father eventually found them.
John moved to Los Angeles in 1918 and worked for a gem company, but it folded during the Depression. Then he designed jewelry for Hollywood film stars and sold stones world wide.
In the 1930s, financially broke, he moved to the desert determined to become a painter and supporting himself as a singer and guitar player. He also operated a curio shop near Indio, California, and from that time lived either in the desert or at Twenty-Nine Palms.
Sketching trips with Maynard Dixon, Nicolai Fechin, Jimmy...
Category
20th Century Impressionist Dorothy Alexandra Johnson Paintings