Thomas Hill's Studio: Art at the Gateway
Near Wawona, California
In eighteen eighty four, the California landscape painter Thomas Hill built a studio at the Wawona Hotel and began one of the most productive periods of his career. Hill had already established himself as one of the great interpreters of Yosemite's scenery, a painter whose large canvases captured the light on El Capitan and Half Dome in ways that made eastern viewers believe in the reality of the place. His studio at Wawona, a wooden building set near the hotel grounds, became part of the attraction.
Hotel guests could watch Hill paint and purchase his work. Hill worked here for more than two decades, producing paintings that hung in parlors across the country and helped define the visual language through which most Americans first understood the Sierra Nevada. He was not alone in drawing an artistic community to Wawona.
Writers, scientists, and other painters were drawn by the hotel's comfort and proximity to spectacular country. Thomas Hill died in nineteen oh eight, having spent his later years painting at Wawona. His studio still stands, preserved by the National Park Service as part of the historic landscape.
It is one of the few surviving artist studios in any national park in the country.
