This biography from the Archives of AskART:
| Flower painter Alice Stew art Hill was born in 1851 in Amboy, New York,
growing up in Beaver Creek, Pennsylvania. She attended the School of
Design of Cooper Union, New York, and the National Academy of Design,
New York City, in 1873-1874.
When she moved to Colorado
Springs in 1874, she revealed herself as a lover of the flowers of
Colorado, both as an artist and someone with a certain level of
botanical science. Riding her horse Gypsy in search of flowers in
the Pike's Peak area, she would return, laden with masses of plants and
color.
She advertised art classes in 1874, teaching "objective
drawing, watercolor, and oil painting," which she would do for a number
of years in Colorado Springs, and briefly in Denver, in
1877-1878. But her first love was the painting of Colorado
flowers in oil and watercolor (occasionally in etching), and their
scientific classification. Well thought of as an artist, Hill had
a large number of her works collected by Harvard University botanist
Asa Gray, an expert on the flora of Colorado.
In 1891 Mentzelids and Chrysanthemums,
both oils, hung at the Chain and Hardy Gallery, Denver. Hill's
paintings were used to illustrate such books as Helen Hunt Jackson's The Procession of Flowers in Colorado,
1886, which was published in a limited edition of one-hundred copies
with some original watercolors by the artist in each volume.
Copies of this rare publication are in the collections of the Charles
Leaming Tutt Library, Colorado College, Colorado Springs; Denver Public
Library; Columbia University Library, New York; Pioneers Museum,
Colorado Springs; Hunt Botanical Library, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; and
New York Public Library.
While exhibiting elsewhere, Hill also
held exhibitions of her work in her Colorado Springs studio, generously
allowing other artists to use it for exhibitions as well. Hill spent
her last years at Jackson Sanitarium, a health resort in Dansville, New
York, where she died January 10, 1896, at the age of only
forty-four. She was buried in Evergreen Cemetery, Colorado
Springs, the final resting place of her friend Helen Hunt Jackson.
Source:
Phil Kovinick and Marian Yoshiki Kovinick, An Encyclopedia of Women Artists of the American West
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