The University of Puget Sound (UPS) is the permanent repository of the collected works of Abby Williams Hill (1861-1943), a rare and important female artist of the American West at the turn of the last century. Hill’s daughter-in-law, Ina Hill (wife of Romayne Hill), donated the 100 or so canvasses and sketches from which UPS’s Kittredge Gallery has formed its current offering: “Abby Williams Hill: Painter of the American West.”

Born Abby Rhoda Williams in Iowa during the time of the American Civil War, Hill was a remarkable female artist who ventured to Chicago and to New York in order to learn the craft of painting in oil. In 1888 she married a young doctor named Frank Hill and the couple traveled to faraway Tacoma in 1889 where they took up residence.

In addition to painting the landscapes of Tacoma, Vashon Island and the South Sound, Hill ventured further afield and became a painter of the American West. A 1903 commission by the Great Northern Railway allowed Hill to earn a living traveling the Western U.S. and capturing the drama of the mountainous region via the medium of oil paint.

The Kittredge show of Hill’s work can be divided into three main groups: portraits of Native Americans, paintings of the Western landscape, and paintings of our own Puget Sound region.

In 1905 Hill traveled to the Flathead reservation in Montana where she forged social ties with and painted portraits of the residents of the reservation including White Bull of the Sioux Nation. Depicting her new friends in their native dress, Hill made portraits that are interesting historical documents.

Landscape rather than portraiture, however, was Hill’s forte. In her work for the Great Northern Railroad and in later excursions to some of the West’s famous landmarks, Hill employed her brushes to good effect. Much of her work was used by the Great Northern as a way to advertise the drama and beauty of the West and to attract settlers to these regions. As a girl from Iowa, the rugged mountains of the West must have offered endless fascination and she painted many and various mountain regions.

Unfortunately, perhaps, our age of the mass consumption of images has rendered such icons as Yosemite’s Half Dome, Yellowstone’s waterfalls, and the Grand Canyon as commonplace sights that do little to excite more than an intellectual curiosity in the contemporary viewer. These national treasures remain unspoiled, and Hill’s paintings of them might have been done by a painter in 2006 as easily as one in 1906. Nevertheless, her “Firehole Pool,” a 1906 oil of a Yellowstone geyser, holds visual interest. Here, a shallow, bubbling and steamy basin is surrounded by chunky, orange earth. Her pink-topped mesas of the Grand Canyon also hold the eye.

It is Hill’s earlier paintings - scenes of her new home - that possess a quiet poetry and visual charm. There is something magical about these canvasses that show the Tacoma region as it appeared over a century ago. Such glimpses of unspoiled Tacoma are valuable. It is indeed rare to get a glimpse of 19th century Tacoma that is not in the form of sepia stained old photos. Hill’s “Mt. Rainier from Vashon Island” of 1900 is stunningly beautiful. The mountain, bathed in a pink-orange glow, seems to rest upon the water and there are just a couple of rustic little cabins nestled on the shoreline.

Hill’s “Steilacoom” is a little more gauzy and impressionistic in its depiction of clusters of fir trees and sunset clouds.

Curated by Andrea Moody and Carol Mallett Adelman, “Abby Williams Hill: Painter of the American West” offers a fascinating look at our own region of a century ago. It also serves as a wonderful introduction to this artistic pioneer of Tacoma and the West. A gallery talk on Hill and her work will be given Monday, Feb. 11 at 5 p.m.