Thomas Hill

Thomas Hill painted the American West on a grand scale, and Yosemite Valley was the subject he returned to more than any other. His views of granite walls, waterfalls and hazy valley floors helped shape how Americans pictured the Sierra Nevada.

Born in Birmingham, England, he emigrated to the United States at fifteen and took evening classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. He moved to San Francisco in 1856, spent some years back on the East Coast painting the White Mountains, and later kept a studio in Yosemite. His best known commission is The Last Spike, a huge canvas of the 1869 completion of the transcontinental railroad, now in the California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento.

In paintings like A View of Yosemite Valley, look for the tiny figures and animals that give the cliffs their scale.