?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 2,000 - $ 3,000
BERN HILL (1911-1977)
SANTA FE / THE CHIEF WAY. 1951.
23 1/4x17 inches, 59x45 cm. Condition A: small abrasions at left edge. Matted and framed.
"The luxurious Super Chief has been powered since its birth in 1936 with General Motors Diesel locomotives on its 39 3/4 hour run between Chicago and Los Angeles. With 769 units in freight and passenger service - and 52 more on order - the growing fleet of GM Diesels on the Santa Fe has rolled up a total of almost half a billion unit miles" (Railway Age, cover August 27, 1951). 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).
