Fail:Hill, John William, Cucumbers, ca. 1860.jpg

Around 1855, after reading Ruskin’s influential Modern Painters, John William Hill changed course and adopted a style closer to that of his son, John Henry Hill, a Pre-Raphaelite artist. The elder Hill began to paint watercolors directly from nature, employing a stipple technique of tiny dots of color in place of his previous method of broad washes cohered by an underlying drawing. (Compare Cucumbers with the artist’s earlier Broadway Looking South from Liberty Street, on view in the previous gallery.) The often down-to-earth subjects of Hill’s later work accord well with the Ruskinian precept that the most compelling beauty is found