John Henry Hill (1839 - 1922)

Untitled (Falls), Oct. 1862

Oil on board

18.50 x 24.25 inches

SOLD

Shoshone Falls on the Snake River, 1870 - 1886

36 x 48 inches

oil on canvas board

SOLD

John Henry Hill absorbed the teachings of a well-known English writer, John Ruskin, who promoted the depicting of nature in meticulous detail. Hill found his calling as an artist after serving in the Civil War, and became a painter of grand vistas with deep clarity and accuracy. Surely there is a suggestion of the sublime in Hill’s masterful depiction of Shoshone Falls, as evidenced by the massive cascades of water, which appear in stark contrast to the barren desert through which the Snake River flows. At the bottom of the image sits a lone observer, possibly Hill himself, surely in a state of wonder.

This imposing canvas measures three by four feet, with a magnificent, gilded period frame. It was painted by Hill from sketches he made in 1868 while a staff artist on Clarence King’s survey of the 40^th Parallel, and was executed between 1870 and 1880, when Hill retreated to a cabin on Phantom Island in the Narrows of Lake George, New York.

John Henry Hill

American 1839 - 1922

Landscape painter, etcher, aquatintist. Born in West Nyack, NY in 1839. From a long line of artists, John Henry was the son of John Wm. Hill (1812- 1879) and grandson of John Hill (1770-1850), a well-known English engraver who immigrated to the U.S. in 1816. The younger Hill began exhibiting in NYC and Philadelphia in the late 1850s.

In 1868 he made a trip to the West as a member of the Clarence King survey expedition. On this trip he did a variety of sketches, watercolors, and gouaches in Idaho, Nevada, Utah, Yosemite and northern California. He returned to New York after about two years and had a studiohome on an island in Lake George where he developed his western sketches into large oils.

Source:

Artists in California 1786 - 1940, Edan Milton Hughes