Thomas Hill

Thomas Hill (1829-1908) was one of the most celebrated painters of the American West, whose grand Romantic landscapes of Yosemite and the California mountains made him one of the most successful and widely reproduced American landscape painters of the late nineteenth century. Born in Birmingham, England, he emigrated to the United States as a boy, settling with his family in Massachusetts and later moving to Philadelphia, where he pursued his artistic training at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. He also studied briefly in Paris under Paul Meyerheim, absorbing the European academic traditions that would inform his mature landscape practice.

Hill moved to California in 1861, drawn by the extraordinary landscapes that were reshaping American ideas about nature and national identity in the years surrounding the Civil War. He quickly established himself as the leading painter of Yosemite Valley, producing an extended body of work devoted to its cliffs, waterfalls, meadows, and giant sequoias, alongside painterly excursions to the White Mountains of New England and the Alps of Europe. His monumental Great Canyon of the Sierra, painted in 1871, is among the great American Romantic landscapes of the nineteenth century, and his Driving of the Last Spike, commemorating the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad, remains an iconic image of American westward expansion.

Hill maintained a studio at Wawona near the entrance to Yosemite, where he painted directly from the landscapes he loved and welcomed visitors who wished to acquire his pictures. His paintings were sought after by the leading American collectors of the era, and he was elected to the National Academy of Design in recognition of his contributions to American landscape painting. His brother Edward Hill also became a successful landscape painter. Today Hill's paintings are held in major American museums, where they remain among the defining images of Yosemite and the nineteenth-century American West.

It is interesting to note that Hill's 1865 View of the Yosemite Valley, on loan from the New-York Historical Society, served as the backdrop for the head table at Barack Obama's 2009 Presidential Inaugural Luncheon. The painting was chosen because it represents the 1864 signing of the Yosemite Grant by Abraham Lincoln, which set aside Yosemite Valley as a public reserve, the first time the federal government had taken such an action and a foundational moment in the history of the American national parks system.