Emerald Bay, Lake Tahoe

An accomplished landscape and portrait painter, Thomas Hill gained his early academic training at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, where he studied under Peter Rothermel. He traveled through the East, spending much time painting the White Mountains in New Hampshire with leading Hudson River School artists as Asher B. Durand and George Inness. Stricken with tuberculosis, Hill moved to California and settled in San Francisco in 1861. Inspired by the dramatic landscape of California, he opened a studio in Yosemite, near the Wawona Hotel where he found financial success selling his works to visitors.

Throughout his years in California, Thomas Hill made many trips to the Sierra-Madre Mountains and Lake Tahoe. Painted in 1883, Emerald Bay, Lake Tahoe "exemplifies the artist's mature style. His brushwork is broader and more formalized, but at the same time more vigorous. More accurately rendered than his earlier landscape, this painting includes an islet that is one of the landmarks of Emerald Bay." (M. Quick and I.S. Fort, American Art: A Catalogue from the Collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California, 1991) Here, the artist displays the sublime grandeur of the lofty peaks jetting from the glass-like surface of the lake. Native Americans are depicted in the foreground to suggest a primitive and untamed quality.