Modern Age
Thomas Hill (1829–1908)
American Rocky Mountain School painter.
Thomas Hill was the leading painter of Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada in nineteenth-century California. He was born in 1829 in Birmingham, England, and emigrated with his family to Massachusetts in the 1840s, where he began as an ornamental and coach painter before studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. In 1861 he moved to San Francisco, and it was the granite cliffs and waterfalls of Yosemite Valley, which he first painted in the 1860s, that gave him his lifelong subject.
Hill worked in the grand-landscape manner made famous by his rival and contemporary Albert Bierstadt, building large panoramic exhibition canvases in the studio from oil sketches made directly before the scenery. After spells in Boston and Europe in the later 1860s he returned to California and became, alongside William Keith, the artist most identified with the Sierra. In 1881 he completed his most ambitious history painting, The Last Spike, commemorating the driving of the final spike at Promontory Summit that joined the first transcontinental railroad.
From the mid-1880s Hill kept a studio at Wawona, at the stage-and-rail gateway to Yosemite, where he produced luminous views of the valley for the growing tourist trade that the railroad had opened to the West. Failing health slowed his work in his final years, and he died in 1908 at Raymond, California, remembered as the definitive painter of the Yosemite sublime.
The words the record keeps using: grand, luminous, sublime, panoramic, serene, atmospheric.
At a glance
- Lived 1829–1908
- Origin American
- Worked in San Francisco, California
- Era Modern Age
- Movements Rocky Mountain School
- Mediums Oil on canvas
- Techniques Oil glazing, Atmospheric perspective, En plein air painting
Works in the archive
- Emerald Bay, Lake Tahoe, 1864 (Los Angeles County Museum of Art (William Randolph Hearst Collection))
An early Sierra subject from Hill's first San Francisco years, looking across the still water of Emerald Bay at the southwest shore of Lake Tahoe toward the surrounding peaks. It shows the tranquil, light-filled… - A View up Yosemite Valley, 1871 (American Museum of Western Art – The Anschutz Collection, Denver)
A luminous panorama looking up Yosemite Valley, with the great granite walls flanking the Merced River as it winds toward a glowing distance. It shows Hill at the height of his powers just after his return to… - The Last Spike (The Driving of the Last Spike), 1881 (California State Railroad Museum, Sacramento)
Hill's most ambitious history painting commemorates the ceremony at Promontory Summit, Utah, on May 10, 1869, where the rails of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific were joined to complete the first transcontinental… - Yosemite Valley, 1900 (American Museum of Western Art – The Anschutz Collection, Denver)
A late, richly worked view of Yosemite Valley from Hill's Wawona years, when he was the region's best-known painter and its granite cliffs and falls had become a national icon. The picture distills decades of study of…
What was said
Arkelian presents Hill as the foremost nineteenth-century painter of Yosemite, whose large panoramic canvases fixed the valley's granite cliffs and cascading falls in the American imagination as an emblem of sublime natural grandeur.
Driesbach documents Hill's practice of painting rapid oil sketches directly from nature in Yosemite and the Sierra, studies of specific light and place that underlie the finished studio landscapes.
Hill's monumental canvas depicts the ceremony of driving the last spike at Promontory Summit that completed the first transcontinental railroad, crowded with portrait likenesses of those present; the museum's record notes the painting's long, contested history and its status as the defining image of the event.
What would Thomas make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after Thomas Hill", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with Thomas · Keep a life moment the way Thomas would · Pictures made after Thomas