Abby Williams Hill

1861 -- 1943

In 1889, the year that Washington became the forty-second state in the union, Abby Williams Hill and her husband, Dr. Frank Hill, arrived in Tacoma, responding to advertisements acclaiming the magnificence of the Northwest mountain scenery.

Abby Hill had both the opportunities and the means to live a comfortable, perhaps prosaic life. But, driven by a desire to experience the grandeur of rugged mountains and to paint those vistas, she rejected the comforts of home and arranged to spend a good portion of her life in the wilderness with her young children.

During the peak years of her artistic career (1903-1906), Hill garnered four successive contracts with major railway companies, which provided extensive periods for camping and landscape painting, and she produced dozens of paintings to extol the beauty of the Northwest. Exhibitions of these works at several world's fairs --notably the St. Louis World's Fair, the Lewis and Clark Exposition, and the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition -- established her reputation as a professional landscape artist. By special arrangements Hill was able to keep almost all her commissioned work. Consequently she may be the only railway artist whose professional work is virtually intact, and the Hill Collection, now owned by the University of Puget Sound, may well be the only one of its kind in the nation.

Although Hill's professional career was brief, she continued to paint. For decades she lived a nomadic life, frequenting national parks in the West where she continued her landscape studies.

Hill's extant work, more than a hundred canvasses, spans more than fifty years and includes floral compositions, still life, and portraits of Sioux, Flathead, Nez Perce, and Yakima Indians. Yet the greater portion of her work deals with Western landscapes ranging from the Cascades, Yosemite Park, Grand Canyon, and Yellowstone Park to the Southwest scenery of Arizona and southern California's Laguna Beach.

In July 1895, aspiring painter Abby Hill joined a 26-day camping expedition to Mt. Rainier. She was new to the wilderness, and her inexperience quickly showed. On the first night her tent collapsed twice. Her knee-length skirt and leggings required some “getting used to,” she said. More knowledgable hikers in the group had to fit her shoes with cork for comfort and hobnails for grip. But Hill was not put off, writing in her daybook after a particularly bitter night: “All were ready to go home in the morning but me. I felt I could endure much for a few days of such grandeur.” And stay she did. Abby Hill had in the vast and varied landscape of the American West at last found the place where she thought she belonged.