Direct From Nature

In his time, Thomas Hill, a British-born painter who worked extensively in the American West during the second half of the nineteenth century, earned favorable comparison with Albert Bierstadt in the East Coast press, and received highest honors for landscape painting at the Philadelphia Centennial. By the late 1860s, his monumental canvases of Yosemite commanded five thousand dollars apiece and attracted national critical acclaim. Hill is generally associated with those paintings of Yosemite and other grand landscapes and his The Driving of the Last Spike. These large-scale compositions, however, incompletely represent Thomas Hill's talents and enthusiams. Some of the artist's finest achievements are realized in smaller paintings, classified as oil sketches, of subjects as diverse as Newport, Rhode Island, Lake Tahoe in California, and the Pacific Northwest. These modest works attest to Hill's powers of observation, his abilities to render immediate descriptions of his subjects, and his enchantment with his motifs. Oil sketches - usually made on board or paper and under sixteen-by-twenty inches - comprise a significant portion of Thomas Hill's work. Spontaneously executed, they capture the artist's direct responses to nature. As a body they offer immediacy and visual delight, as well as insights into the artist's broad interests and the cultural context in which he worked. And because they represent, in many cases, the only surveying evidence of larger-scale paintings made from them, the oil sketches are key to documenting Hill's career. - excerpted from the essay by Janice T. Driesbach. -- from front cover flap.