?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 1,500 - $ 2,500
JOHN HENRY HILL Lake George, October 15, 1873.
Watercolor on cream wove paper, 1873. 174x251 mm; 6 7/8x9 7/8 inches. Dated in watercolor by the artist, and inscribed "excellent only sky careless and stones unfinished" and initialed by John Ruskin, in ink, lower right recto, and inscribed "Lake George" in pencil, lower left recto.
Provenance: Estate of Christian Olsen, circa 1922; Dorothy Olsen Davis; Washburn Gallery, New York, with the label; private collection, New York.
Exhibited: "John William Hill and John Henry Hill," Washburn Gallery, New York, October 10-November 3, 1979; "The New Path: Ruskin and the American Pre-Raphaelites," The Brooklyn Museum, New York, March 29-June 10, 1985, and Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, July 3-September 8, 1985, number 25; "The American Pre-Raphaelites: Radical Realists," National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., April 14-July 21, 2019, number 32 (illustrated), with the label.
Published: Linda S. Ferber and William H. Gerdts, The New Path: Ruskin and the American Pre-Raphaelites, The Brooklyn Museum, New York, 1985, page 178. illustrated.
According to the publication accompanying "The New Path: Ruskin and the American Pre-Raphaelites," held at the Brooklyn Museum, Hill's (1839-1922) art was noticed by John Ruskin as early as 1860, and the two corresponded through the early 1880's, with Ruskin instructing Hill and critiquing his sketches. Hill lived on Lake George in the early 1870's in relative seclusion. The current watercolor is one of a group of works by Hill and his father John Henry Hill, which were saved by a neighbor, Christian Olsen, from a fire in Hill's West Nyack studio in the 1920s.
