Thomas Hill is identified with the scenery of California. His family in 1844 immigrated to Taunton, Massachusetts, where he was employed in a cotton mill. He next worked as a decorative painter in Gardner, Massachusetts, and as a carriage painter and decorative painter in Boston. He married in 1851. In 1853 Hill entered the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia and attended the life class of Peter Rothermel (1817-1895). During the later 1850s he worked in Massachusetts and painted in the White Mountains with leading Hudson River school artists. Threatened with tuberculosis, he and his family moved to the milder climate of California, settling in San Francisco in 1861. At this time Hill was primarily a portrait painter but also painted California landscapes. In 1866 he studied for six months in Paris with Paul Meyerheini (1842-1915), who advised him to specialize in landscape painting. From 1868 to 1870 he lived in Boston, but his health forced him to return to San Francisco. He prospered during the boom of the 1870s, primarily as a landscape painter. He was awarded a bronze medal at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876 and the Temple Medal of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1884. He experienced financial setbacks during the economic depression that struck California beginning in 1879. During the summers of 1880 and 1892 and fall of 1886 he painted in the White Mountains. In the summer of 1886 he established his studio next to the Wawona Hotel in Yosemite, where he sold paintings to tourists. His winter studio was in San Francisco, but beginning in the early 1890s, he wintered in Raymond, California. Hill continued to travel until about 1896, when his health declined, and he painted very little thereafter.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Samuel G. W. Benjamin, Our American Artists (1881; reprint, New York: Garland, 1977), pp. 22-26 § California Art Research Project 2 (December 1936): 67-97a, with list of representative works, bibliography § Hardy George, "Thomas Hill (1829-1908)," Master’s thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, 1963, with bibliography, reprint of Hill’s History of the "Spike Picture"; and Why It Is Still in My Possession (1884) § Hardy George, "Thomas Hill’s ‘Driving of the Last Spike,’ A Painting Commemorating the Completion of America’s Transcontinental Railroad," Art Quarterly 27 (Spring 1964): 82-93 § Oakland Museum and others, Thomas Hill: The Grand View, exh. cat., 1980, with text by Marjorie Dakin Arkelian, chronology, bibliography.