As we sit down for Thanksgiving dinner at my Grandmother Dalton’s house in Kalamazoo, Michigan, I gaze at the mural covering the wall and think, as I always do in her dining room,“Who would be stupid enough to get inside a wine barrel and tumble over Niagara Falls?”

Dining room mural gazing was the closest I got to art in my childhood. The painter used muted tones of gray, and pastel soft greens and blues. I feel like I’m in a boat, bobbing on the waves, surrounded by Niagara Falls and the cliffs. I feel the cool mist from the cascading water on my face. People on the hills look at the falls. I feel a part of the scene. After dinner, I linger to look closely at the falling wine barrel and wonder what it sounds like to the man inside. I wonder how much the landing will knock him around, and if he’ll live! And if he does, how he’ll he get out. The mural opened a channel of awe, wonder and curiosity.

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I didn’t think much about art until Freshman year at Williams College when I took Whit Stoddard’s Art 101. Nineteenth century landscapes blew me away.

When I was a guest at the Bohemian Club a few years ago, my Grandmother’s Niagara Falls mural came to mind when I saw a huge landscape painting in the Main Room. As I gazed at it, I wanted to become a part of the scene. Around the club, I saw other landscape paintings and felt the deepest connection to those painted by Thomas Hill. 

Curious about that attraction, I decided to explore it. Tonight, I am reaching far beyond my comfort zone to present an art paper. I have no formal education in art. Until researching this paper, I felt unqualified to have–let alone share–any opinions about art.

You see, I had fallen into the camp long ago, of thinking artists live on a mystical plane. I believed I needed rigorous academic training before I could truly appreciate their creations. What I had failed to recognize was their journey could be just like anyone else’s who has to make a living. It’s about the money, too. Hill could spend his working life painting landscapes only if they sold. Realizing the importance of the consumer side of artistic expression helped me relax and be an untrained art observer, qualified to critique art from the point of view of the value it provides to me.

Art offers a means of expression for the artist. Art can also educate and entertain. Art can create beauty, tell a story, record an event. It can release an emotional response like awe and wonder, and even expand a person’s worldview. When you look at a Delacroix, you can see slaughtered animals and wonder who could be so cruel, or the future feast of a king. When you see Andy Warhol’s painting of Campbell soup cans, you can marvel at the breadth of what we agree to be art. Study Jackson Pollack’s Full Fathom Five, and you might ponder what makes a canvas splattered with paint a piece of art, let alone one created by a genius. Art is ultimately an encounter between an object and a person, where the viewer experiences a valuable emotional response. Everyone brings their own lived experiences, emotions, biases, perspectives, and expectations to their viewing. The value to a person is subjective and can inspire, provoke, challenge, transform, and create a sense of awe and wonder.

Which brings me to Thomas Hill, and my emotional response to his landscapes.

Thomas Hill was born in 1829. He started his career as a decorative painter of carriages at 15. By 17, he was adding color and character to furniture and porticoes as an apprentice interior decorator. Hoping to become a portrait or landscape painter, at 24 he was finally able to take his shot. He moved to Philadelphia in 1853 to attend art lessons from Peter Rothermel at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He must have been a fast study: Five years later, in 1858, Hill presented his first exhibition at Leonard and Company in Boston. The show garnered little attention, however, which–given Hill’s family of four children and growing–compelled him to return to decorating furniture for a living. 

While Hill was struggling to get his portrait and landscape painting business up and running, another American landscape artist was experiencing unprecedented success. Albert Bierstadt was born in 1830 with enough family wealth for a high-end art education. He found his stride and greatest fame with extravagant portrayals of the largely unexplored territory of the American West, fueling interest in the Western Expansion. One trip to the Rocky Mountains in the summer of 1859, for example, produced a particular windfall: Bierstadt took photographs, produced paintings, and collected Indian artifacts. Upon his return to Boston, he sold the lot to an East Coast public crazy for anything branded “Bierstadt,” oil painting or not. In one sense, Bierstadt was merely tapping into what Thomas Cole had begun in the 1820s: recording native scenery. In another, he was feeding the vision urban Americans had of a vast, clean, untrammeled land over the Western horizon. Bierstadt’s idealized version of the American West, gloriously portrayed, bigger and brighter than real life, made his paintings go viral.

Bierstadt’s success must’ve eaten at Hill, who referred to Bierstadt as “old master” partly out of resentment. Bierstadt’s paintings were much more commercially successful that Hill’s. In fact, I’ll surmise that Hill’s envy and his desire to become wealthy from painting Western landscapes, prompted him to move West. Hill thought a move to San Francisco would put him closer to the action, rather than traveling back and forth between the East and the West as Bierstadt was doing. Living in San Francisco, Hill could produce a greater number of the bigger-than-life scenes for the insatiable appetite of art collectors on the East Coast. In April 1861 Hill, 32, took the leap: He put his family on a stagecoach, bumped and jostled along the dusty Lewis and Clark Trail and arrived in San Francisco a month later.

Hill established himself in the lucrative business of painting portraits, at which he was highly skilled. He took many trips into the wild lands around San Francisco to become familiar with painting landscapes. In 1863 he exhibited six portraits and six landscapes at San Francisco’s Mechanics Institute to a favorable reception. It took two more years, however, before he sold his first major landscape painting: Sugar Loaf Peak, Eldorado County, 1865. Hill’s ability to support his family was looking up.  

Also in 1865, a wave of painters discovered the favorable artistic climate of San Francisco, and moved there, including none other than Albert Bierstadt. He lost no time in stunning the world with the first gigantic canvas of Yosemite, Looking Down Yosemite Valley (1865) [1], measuring 65 by 100 inches. Bierstadt took it to Boston and made a killing selling it. A local San Francisco newspaper, The Golden Era, breathlessly asked, “Why should our artists make the pilgrimage to the Alps for mountains, to Italy for skies, or to the Chamouni Valley, when we have the mountains and the skies of California, and the valley of Yo-semite…”

Having heard enough of Bierstadt’s success with this valley called Yosemite, Hill headed there for the first time in August of 1865. I have wondered what it must have been like for these city-bred painters to venture into the California wildlands. Despite Bierstadt’s trips, very little was known about the place. The first European Americans had entered Yosemite Valley only fourteen years before. Were man-eating grizzlies really as dangerous as the stories settlors told to city-slickers? What about venomous snakes, and extreme heat, and Sierra blizzards? A painter had to be truly committed to his craft to endure such potential dangers, discomforts, and uncertainties. Feeling committed helped when you knew you had chance to make a lot of money. 

An intriguing aspect of Hill’s work is his encounters with Indians in the Valley, given the Indian Wars taking place nearby. The Pyramid Lake War of 1860, just north of what is now Reno, pitted the US Government against the Paiute (pie-yoot) Indians, generally considered a peaceful people. The US defeated the Northern Paiutes (pie-yoots), and forcibly moved them to reservations and assimilation schools.

When Hill painted in the Sierra Nevada mountains, he had friendly and respectful interactions with the Paiute people. He hired them as guides and traded with them for  supplies. As his painting took him south to the Yosemite Valley, he continued his peaceful interactions with the Paiute people even making them central figures in his paintings. He depicted them building shelters, fishing and gathering food. 

On his trips, Hill did not stay long in Yosemite. He didn’t need to. He was advancing the practice of painting “oil sketches” in the field. These in situ renderings, many as small as eight by ten inches, enabled Hill to capture not only key aspects of the landscape, but the overall interplay of light and atmosphere quickly, in the moment, without planning every detail.

It was back in his studio where Hill painted the full Monty from his oil sketches. As his career matured, Hill built a reputation for doing such accurate oil sketches that collectors bought these too, in addition to his fully realized paintings. One art critic wrote that Hill had become as good as Bierstadt and can quote“...make more paintings in any given amount of time than any other man.” Hill must have enjoyed his favorable comparison to Bierstadt.  

Fun fact: Painting oil sketches in the field was not feasible until 1841 when American portrait artist, John Goff Rand invented the squeezable metallic tube. Simply applying hand pressure or turning a key at the sealed end of the tube squished the paint towards the opening, closable by a cap or a stopper. This invention allowed painters to carry dozens of tubes in a wide array of colors, ready to use in an instant.

Shortly after his August visit to Yosemite in December 1865, Hill completed his first big sale of a Yosemite painting, View of the Yosemite Valley [2]. It depicts the Valley just as you might see it on a sunny summer day. El Capitan with its sheer granite face rising straight up three thousand feet above the valley floor; Bridal Veil Falls gushing over the cliff, tumbling 600 feet, crashing against boulders sending off churning clouds of mist; and Half Dome, once a complete sphere before glaciation sheared off its upper portion. Two people on horseback are barely visible. I could be one of them. 

Fun fact about this painting: In 2009, View of the Yosemite Valley was the backdrop of the head table at Barack Obama's inaugural luncheon. The painting commemorated Abraham Lincoln's signing of the Yosemite Grant in 1864, the first federal parkland established for preservation and public use. The Yosemite Grant laid the groundwork to create America’s first national park, Yellowstone, in 1872. By choosing this painting, President Obama was messaging the high value his presidency would place on the environment, conservation, and parklands.

Now, back to the 19th century… 

Hill achieved great financial success in the decades of 1860, ‘70, and ‘80, fueled largely by his 500 paintings of Yosemite. He had his biggest moment of recognition in 1871 with his Great Cañon of the Sierra, Yosemite[3], a vast 72 by 120-inch canvas, exhibited in New York, Boston, and Chicago. One Boston newspaper described it as quote“...a success and the grandest one Mr. Hill has achieved.” The Watson’s Art Journal, a widely respected publication in the 19th Century whose influence is still felt today, wrote:

“If it be true that Art, like Christianity and Civilization, has for its mission to bring us back to Nature and so to God, then indeed is Thomas Hill…the apostle of Truth, in whose capacious brain the majestic forms and subtle effects of Nature have come to rest; and in the ‘Canyon of the Sierras’ he has given us the incarnation of his ideas, with all the power, freshness and grandeur of nature. From a national point of view we look upon this as a representative picture, and one that not only the Palette Club but all Americans can be proud of.”[1]

These Yosemite scenes brought fame and fortune to Hill. They also further catalyzed the Western Expansion.

I have to think Hill must have gloated when, two months later, he read the disparaging review the Watson’s Art Journal gave to a Bierstadt painting of the Rocky Mountains:

"Mr. Bierstadt's imagination is beyond his powers of execution, and his pictures fail to realize our expectations, by reason of an over-elaboration of detail... In this respect, he compares unfavorably with his rival, and, we think, superior, Thomas Hill, who possesses a freshness, originality, and power which nothing of Mr. Bierstadt's, that we have seen, can equal." [2]

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I’d like to explore the ways in which Hill makes me want to climb into the canvas and become a part of the scene compared to how Bierstadt makes me feel distant and separate. Sugar Loaf Peak, Eldorado County mentioned above is a good starting point. The peak itself is just a backdrop to a scene where a Native American, I’m guessing a Paiute (pie-yoot), lugs a long pole balanced on his shoulder while walking on a big log. He’s headed to his family’s campsite, where he will add the log to the others and finish draping the whole with blankets and skins of different colors to complete their shelter. Another Native American is coddling an infant. Three dogs lie quietly, catching the last rays of sun. An owl overlooks the scene from his perch on a dead snag.

I love how Hill includes humans as part of nature, not separate from her. The large boulders, gigantic peaks, snow-covered mountain in the distance, and the huge roiling river portray a vastness peacefully inhabited by the humans and dogs along with their shelter in their tiny clearing in the foreground. I can easily imagine coming upon this scene and being invited into the fold. 

How Hill portrays humankind in relation to nature was influenced by his time spent with the Hudson River School in New York. He studied there and painted in the nearby White Mountains of New Hampshire. He perfected the School’s practice of giving the viewer a detailed, close-up look at nature from a humble perspective. The school’s philosophy was to paint a scene for the viewer to appreciate the immensity of nature and feel respect and reverence for its beauty, force, and grandeur. In Hill’s compositions, humans are embedded in nature, living harmoniously with everything in the wild. He eschewed artificiality and rejected the romanticized exaggeration of nature, even though Bierstadt’s profits were nearly as grandiose as his painting style.

Another of Hill’s work is his Indian Camp, Yosemite Valley (1873). It depicts Bridal Veil Falls in the background, with the viewer’s eye being brought to the foreground into a Sierra Miwok camp. Like my Grandma’s mural, the painting pulls me into the landscape. I can imagine the distant roar of the falls, feel the heat of the valley floor, and wonder how the Miwok stored acorns they used for food, in those tall shaggy pillars.

Contrast those reactions with my response to the 1873 Bierstadt gargantuan 72 by 120-inch painting, Donner Lake from the Summit. He could’ve just as easily called it “Donner Lake from My Perspective as God.” The foreground portrays dark fields with boulders and a few spindly trees. The lake sits in the distance, covered in bright white fog. The sun, high above, sends down its luminous rays of blinding light. There’s a railroad snow shed along the mountain on the right. It is a slice of white cutting through one of the obstructing hills, while the surrounding environs remain in darkness. It seems a manifest nod to Manifest Destiny, showing how man strives to conquer nature, rather than live in harmony with her.

Hill painted the same scene with practically the identical perspective. He named his painting simply Donner Lake, which he completed a year after Bierstadt’s, in 1874. From my home in Presidio Heights on a typical foggy, windy, summer day, I can imagine taking one step and finding myself in the foreground of Hill’s scene. I rub my hand along the rough tree stump, grateful for the heat from the midday sun to warm my chilly bones. I start walking, strolling among the fir trees, scrub oaks, and boulders to the edge of Donner Pass and gaze at the glimmering blue, beautiful lake. I notice a manmade structure off in the distance to my right, a snowshed precariously perched along the steep mountain cliffs to protect the railroad cars from avalanches. Looking at the frail wooden construction, I wonder how it could possibly stand up to the forces of nature.

There’s no hint of man conquering nature in Hill’s depiction. Rather, his rendering leaves one wondering if nature will conquer man.

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Unlike Bierstadt’s grandiose depictions, Hill’s paintings–just as large–portray a more natural, inviting, believable, and to me far more appealing Nature. But were they better? Would they stand the test of time? Wouldn’t it have blown Hill’s mind to know that 144 years after he painted View of Yosemite Valley, a president would choose it over all others to be the most prominent decoration at an inaugural luncheon?

I can see why President Obama chose a Hill landscape rather than a Bierstadt. Hill’s portrayal of man and nature is more in line with today’s dominant attitudes than Bierstadt’s. Hill’s emphasis is on mankind’s rightful place in Nature. His landscapes resonate with the uproar from today’s youth over man’s destruction of nature. We blow the tops off mountains to get the coal, dam up the mightiest rivers to get the water, fill the air with poisons from industrial smoke stacks, melt glaciers and warm oceans with fossil fuel exhaust, they shout…

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In thinking back to my Grandma Dalton’s dining-room mural, I’m struck with how much more like a Hill landscape it was than a Bierstadt: Man is portrayed as tiny and beholden to the mighty Niagara Falls, fitting in with the forces of Nature, being playful in her midst (and mist).

As I grow older, I continue to look for awe and wonder. I never want to stop feeling part of Nature, rather than separate from her. I want us as a species to learn how to live in harmony with her forces of creation as well as her destructive power. I want us to work with her cycles, her bounteousness, and ultimately, understand and respect her limits to provide for humanity’s ever-increasing demands.

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Writing this paper has connected me with the power of art to evoke strong emotional responses of awe, wonder, delight, and gratitude for the paintings, as well as for the artists. I am grateful for being in the club, and to all of you for listening to my paper.  

Thank you.