Challenging the Atmospheric: American Pre-Raphaelite Drawing on the Fortieth Parallel Survey

Timothy O’Sullivan’s series of Shoshone Falls, Idaho includes some of the most celebrated images he produced during his tenure as photographer for the Geological Exploration of the Fortieth Parallel, led by the geologist Clarence King. While King served as staffage in several photographs, often another man appears in the frame, seen from behind. Previously anonymous in the expedition’s history, this figure is John Henry Hill, an American Pre-Raphaelite painter who was the survey’s staff artist. While the Fortieth Parallel Survey’s photographic output is well documented, Hill’s presence on the expedition and his resulting oeuvre have been overlooked. His unpublished diary, field sketchbook, and over seventy recently located topographical drawings challenge existing narratives around visual production in the American West. This paper examines the picture-making excursion to Idaho made by King, Hill, and O’Sullivan in 1868. Examining Hill’s drawings and paintings executed at Shoshone, I argue that King’s motives for hiring Hill went beyond visual recordkeeping. Hill’s images were used by King to persuade eastern audiences of the validity of his then-unconventional scientific views that the earth’s surface was formed by ancient violent geologic activity. Though modest in scale and subject and dispassionately empiricist, Hill’s watercolors also subverted expansionist narratives that accompanied many post-bellum representations of western landscapes by better-known survey artists Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran. Hill’s oeuvre reveals that an allegiance to Pre-Raphaelite aesthetics offered the artist a toolkit to reframe the goals of a government survey.