John William Hill
John William Hill
1812 - 1879
Painter and illustrator, son of (1) John Hill. At the age of seven he moved to Philadelphia, PA, with his family. In 1822 he moved to New York, where he was apprenticed to his father for seven years. During this time, he worked on the aquatint plates for William Guy Wall’s Hudson River Portfolio (1821–5), which influenced his early paintings.
By 1828 Hill was submitting his landscapes to the National Academy of Design, New York, and he continued to do so until 1873. He was elected an Associate Academician in 1833, and in the same year he visited London to study Old Master paintings. From 1836 to 1841 Hill served as a topographical artist for the New York State Geological Survey and from 1842 provided illustrations for James E. De Kay’s Natural History of New York, Part 1: Zoology. After joining the Smith Brothers publishing firm in the late 1840s, he travelled extensively to sketch views of major North American cities. In 1850 he was a founder-member of the short-lived New York Water Color Society, precursor of the American Water Color Society.
About 1855 Hill read the first two volumes of John Ruskin’s Modern Painters (London, 1843–6), which significantly changed the direction and style of his art. From then on he devoted himself to painting directly from nature, depicting flowers, plants, fruit and birds in natural backgrounds (e.g. Bird’s Nest and Dogroses, 1867; New York, NY Hist. Soc.). By adopting the stipple technique—pin-point dabs of pigment applied to a white ground—he was able to achieve brilliant colour and a high degree of exactitude.
In 1863 Hill became President of the American Pre-Raphaelite organization, the Society for the Advancement of Truth in Art. Hill exhibited almost yearly at the Brooklyn Art Association, which held a memorial retrospective of his work soon after his death. Such late landscapes as View on Catskill Creek (1867; New York, Met.) focus on the area around his home in West Nyack. One of his sons, John Henry Hill (1839–1922), was a watercolourist; he perpetuated his father’s memory by publishing an illustrated biography and by promoting his work at major museums. [Edward J. Nygren and Annette Blaugrund. "Hill." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 8, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T038116pg2.]
Person TypeIndividual
Terms
