A Woman in Love with the Great Wide Open

How a doctor’s wife in frontier Tacoma trekked into the woods with a paintbrush and was never the same again

(from left) Glacier Peaks, Spring Sunshine, 1903; Portrait of Abby Williams Hill, date unknown; Yellowstone Falls (from below), 1905; all images courtesy of University of Puget Sound

If Tacoma’s Abby Williams Hill had a national holiday named after her, masses of revelers would take the day off to flood national parks and forests, easels under their arms and children at their heels, eager to explore and record something we don’t have enough of anymore: wilderness.

Hill was an artist at the turn of the twentieth century commissioned by railroad barons to lure tourists west with beautiful paintings of the exotically wild yet tourist-friendly frontier.  She was possibly the only woman of her time to get such a job. Though she’s overshadowed by more talented contemporaries, enough of her paintings and personal effects remain to inspire a blockbuster Merchant Ivory biopic.

Yet for various reasons she has remained just short of obscure for over half a century.

Abby Williams Hill and her children at their camp
in Yellowstone National Park, c. 1905.

Hill was a doctor’s wife, but she didn’t act like one. Born in Grinnell, Iowa, she studied painting with notable teachers including Hermann Haase and the Impressionist master William Merritt Chase. She was cosmopolitan, fluent in French and German, a social activist and an adoptive parent. When she moved to Tacoma in 1889, she found an even fiercer driving force that lasted the rest of her life: the rugged outdoors.

Every chance she had, she was off in the woods camping, hiking and sometimes facing hungry bears, one of whom was hand-fed by one of her equally dauntless daughters. Seeing a rattlesnake, a creature she loathed, did not faze her — though she wrote in her diary that she did wish more people wore rattlesnake-skin belts.

And though she was away from home more often than not, she managed to maintain a very close relationship with her children. It would have been scandalous for a woman of her standing to earn money, so she traded paintings for train passes and took her family with her. She educated her children herself, weaving into the curriculum hikes through the forest, memorizing poetry in rowboats and baking bread while camping. Back in civilization, she managed to exhibit work across the country, join the Congress of Mothers, and write angry letters protesting deforestation. She also formed lasting friendships with American Indians on reservations, where she traveled to paint portraits, and one of her personal heroes was Booker T. Washington (after whom, in a completely odd turn of events, she had the privilege of naming Mt. Booker). She defied feminine convention, ridiculing women’s sheeplike tendency to obey the dictates of fashion. And she didn’t seem to care about socializing unless it was related to activism or art. In short, Hill was not one to stay cooped up in a parlor with the vapors.

Empty Papoose Case, 1906, courtesy of University of Puget Sound

You can examine a small group of her paintings in the main hallway of Jones Hall at UPS, or glance awkwardly over the heads of typing administrators — the paintings hang in an arbitrary, though decorative order around their offices. But if you didn’t know their history, you probably wouldn’t look twice. Her landscapes come off a bit bland. She didn’t have a great knack for conveying scale, and her color palette and choice of scenery are, at best, what we would pejoratively think of as “romantic.” Luckily, when Ron Fields, professor emeritus of art history, first arrived here in the sixties and found her paintings hanging with almost no information about them, he took it upon himself to find out more — and ended up spending over twenty years unpacking the story behind them.

The resulting book, Abby Williams Hill and the Lure of the West, is a nice, conversational introduction to her life’s work, packed with anecdotes vividly illustrating her character. Her life draws us in much more than her work. As Fields confesses, “She’s not the best in the west. But she’s a very good painter.”

Though Andrea Moody, current consulting curator of the Hill collection, points out influences of Impressionism in Hill’s work, she notes, “Her style changes throughout her life. There’s not a consistent trajectory.” So it’s hard to assign her to a particular camp; Hill did not have a lot of contact with other artists. Whereas Hill’s more famous contemporary Emily Carr got mixed up in the “Group of Seven,” the Rat Pack of Canadian landscape painters, Hill was out painting in the middle of nowhere, alone but for her children.

Hill evidently did not talk much about her work, so there’s not much to do except speculate on her intentions. Looking at the oils of pink mountains, teal water, orange skies and dark trees, my eye drifts over the surface, looking for a focal point. Often, the paint is so thin that the texture of the canvas still shows. Here’s how critic Roberta Winters describes the work of arguably the greatest Impressionist painter, Monet: “The eye hovers and zooms over the surface like a dragonfly.…His brushwork is modest, notional, almost scriptlike. As with our dragonfly gaze, it too skips across the surface — and skips and skips and skips again….It is all about accumulation: the layering of color, the buildup of texture.” Maybe Hill was going for a similar effect, but she didn’t completely pull it off.

On the other hand, her life is recorded very closely in years of diaries and daybooks, boxes of pamphlets, photographs and artifacts, and six banker’s boxes of correspondence, all neatly stacked up in a dim, half-used storage room in the University of Puget Sound library. Fields spent years transcribing most of it. Reading through it, we get a vivid picture of Hill as an activist, nature enthusiast, artist and dedicated mother. In letters addressed sweetly to her children (“My Dearest Boy...”) and filled with storybook illustrations, she is entertaining — trying to send a piece of herself home to her children (her “flock”) or her husband from somewhere far away, where she has gone to satisfy a personal need she could not fulfill at home in Tacoma.

If she belongs to any tradition, it is certainly plein air (outdoors) painting; Hill was the heir of those early Impressionists who loved to take the train out of Paris and document the lives of the country people on sunny days. According to H. W. Janson, Impressionism came into fashion (thanks to Monet) because “painting needed to be rescued from competition with the camera.” Realism, or the on-the-spot immediacy of a scene, is what painters used to achieve this. Though Hill’s paintings don’t strike the modern eye as successfully realist, that’s what they are in the context of her time. “I think she felt very strongly that what was there [in nature] was enough,” says Moody. “And she was recognized for that.”

While luminous painters like Albert Bierstadt took a lot of visual notes and then painted later in the controlled environment of a studio, adding dramatic light, foreboding clouds and exotic creatures, Hill worked directly from what she saw. And sometimes what she saw was just plain, uninterrupted wilderness with no drama but what was present in the shape a shadow might draw on a cliff face.

Other times, the drama remained strictly in the process.

Fields marvels at “her extraordinary independence, her sheer nerve to pack up and live out in the woods with kids from one dead winter to the next dead winter, driven out only by snow.…She had a fortitude that would probably be a little scary if we ever met her.”

She often hiked, climbed or rode on horseback for miles until she found the right place to set up her “painting tent,” carrying all her materials with her. With few exceptions, she completed her paintings on the spot, despite wind, rain, excessive heat or cold, or even sand and debris sticking to her canvases. Then there were the national park tourists incessantly interrupting her work. They seem to have irritated her almost as much the bugs and rattlesnakes.

Hill also seems to have suffered from migraines, a debilitating condition that must have made painting in the wilderness increasingly difficult. But it was worth it to have the freedom to move and do as she pleased.

Laguna Beach Scene, 1912

While her family helped Hill feel at home in the wild, it was a storm of family trouble that finally drove her out of her wilderness paradise.

Dr. Hill suffered what seem to have been episodes of psychotic depression, requiring regular hospitalization. Because warm weather was thought to improve well-being back in the day, the Hills moved to California. There Abby lived in relative isolation in a house on Laguna Beach. In light of this, it’s difficult not to read some loneliness into her beach paintings, which have a lot of sky space compared to the roaring pink and orange cliffs that preoccupy her earlier commissions.

But she didn’t entirely give up on the open road. She camped in Yosemite, and when Dr. Hill showed improvement from 1924 to 1931, she once again led a gypsy life, traveling and painting all over the country with Dr. Hill and one of their daughters. This was a relatively happy time, until Dr. Hill’s illness returned.

They went back to California, and eventually Abby had to stay away from her husband — she feared he might harm someone. Dr. Hill met his end in a hospital near San Diego in 1938. Abby Hill hit a wall then, remaining “bedfast” until her own death five years later.

Though Moody says she occasionally gets phone calls from people who have pieces of the “missing” Hill oeuvre, the collection remains a static, decorative plume in the cap of the University. Since Hill didn’t sell her work — and the University can’t sell it now — a public following hasn’t grown around it. Despite the size and uniqueness of the collection, her works seem to hang in suspended animation.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Hill couldn’t have been wholly satisfied with the act of painting. Otherwise I think she would have done sketches in the wild and more painting at home, camping for days instead of months at a time. Really, it seems she painted to be close to nature,not the other way around. She was a thrill seeker, a romantic, a sucker for color, which I imagine wasn’t abundant in a frontier town like Tacoma. Above all, she was intrepid, unafraid to step outside the limits society set for her.

One day in 1895, after a trip to Hood Canal, she took out her daybook and wrote with satisfaction, “It was thought no woman had ventured as far as I did today.” As painters of original talent and sustained ambition, others went further. But as an adventurer, she blazed a path all her own.

Upcoming Exhibits

Cut Out for the Wilds: The Collected Papers of Artist and Activist Abby Williams Hill, Collins Memorial Library, UPS; October 22 – January 5

No Woman has Ventured as Far: A Living History Performance by Karen Haas, Collins Memorial Library; November 7, 2:00 p.m.

Glimmering Gone: Beth Lipman & Ingalena Klenell (showing works Inspired by Hill), Museum of Glass; opening October 2010