?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,200 - $ 1,800
BERN HILL (1911-1977)
FAST FREIGHT SERVICE IN THE GREAT MIDWEST. Circa 1950s.
24x18 inches, 61x45 3/4 cm. Condition A. Paper.
Bern Hill was a graphic designer and painter. He "worked for the Kudner Agency, a New York City advertising firm. At the end of 1949, General Motors' Electro-Motive Division embarked on a rather radical advertising campaign which included vertical format streamline style paintings for the covers of Railway Age" (Vintage Rails, January / February 1998, p. 64). Between 1950 and 1956, Hill painted 65 paintings. "Electro-Motive also produced a series of very high-grade posters of Hill's paintings that were overwritten by the marketing theme for that particular railroad . . . it is unknown if all 65 paintings were turned into posters . . . Hill's assignment was to portray the 'feel' of each railroad in a scene that often captured the landscape of the individual road and gave the viewer the sense of that road's missions - freight, passenger or switching" (Railroad Heritage, No. 6, 2002, p. 10). Here, for the Minneapolis & St. Louis Railway, Hill provides a dramatic, track-level view of an approaching locomotive.
