Anna Althea Hills (1882-1930) was an exceptional California impressionist, well trained at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cooper Union in New York, and the Academie Julian in Paris. She was a daring and able painter, and valued member of the Laguna Beach Art Association.

Her early landscapes were done in the darker atmospheric Barbizon tradition, but once in California's light and landscape and after getting to know the incredible array of her Southern California contemporaries such as Edgar Payne and George Brandriff, she embraced brighter joyous colors, increasingly abandoning her brushes for her palette knife.

A tireless art teacher and an advocate for the arts, she helped establish the Laguna Beach Art

Association, the Laguna Museum of Arts, and could often be observed holding painting classes along Laguna Beach cliffs. She also administered art education for the Orange County schools by organizing traveling exhibitions of students' work

After her studies in Chicago and New York, she moved to Paris in 1908 and remained in Europe four years. During her stay, she attended the Julian Academy and painted landscapes throughout France, Holland, and the South of England.

In 1912, she moved to Southern California, and a year later, settled in Laguna Beach. According to Ruth Westphal (author of Plein Air Painters of California), Anna Hills became "a prominent figure in the art history of Southern California." Her favored locales were in and around Laguna Beach, Mission San Juan Capistrano, the California Coast as far north as Carmel, and she often spent the winter months in nearby Banning and Hemet from where she enjoyed painting excursions into the California and Arizona deserts.

In addition to her intensive artistic output, she found time to teach and the drive to serve as a founding member of the Laguna Art Association, serving as its President for six terms. In the year before her death, she masterminded the campaign to establish what is now the Laguna Museum of Art.

Throughout her teaching and Art Association activities, Anna sought to expand the public's awareness of art and the beauty of the Southern California landscape.

Tragically for the California Art World (according to the Fleischer Museum website), Anna Hills died of a heart attack at the age of 48. One can't help but wonder what her painting career could have produced if she had several more decades of life.

Anna exhibited widely, including exhibiting with the San Francisco Art Association, the California Art Club, the Panama Pacific Exhibition in San Diego, the Laguna Beach Art Association, the California State Fair in Sacramento. She had one-person shows at the Kanst Galleries in Los Angeles. the Los Angeles Museum, and California State University, Long Beach. Her works are often featured in shows offered by the Irvine Museum.

Henri despised awards or commercial success as an accurate measure of the value of a piece of art. He said, "The most destructive threat to art was the prize. ... The pernicious influence of the prize and medal given in art is so great that it should be stopped. History proves that juries in art have been generally wrong." ...

"The only reason for the survival of the award system is purely commercial."

Rather than competing for awards or creating paintings designed for commercial success, Henri believed artists should be introspective. He said, "The real artist's work is to surprise himself. ... Art is, after all, only a trace – like a footprint which shows that one has walked bravely and in great happiness. ... When the artist is alive in any person... he becomes an inventive, searching, daring, self-expressing creature. He becomes interesting to other people. He disturbs, upsets, enlightens, and he opens ways for better understanding."

Henri valued art lovers who approached a piece of art with an active and inquisitive mind. The true art lover is not attracted to a particular painting by awards won or a big price tag, but because the piece of art connects with them. He said, "The man who has honesty, integrity, the love of inquiry, the desire to see beyond, is ready to appreciate good art. He needs no one to give him an 'Art Education'; he is already qualified. He needs but to see pictures with his active mind, look into them for the things that belong to him, and he will find soon enough in himself an art connoisseur and an art lover of the first order."

Beyond his fame as a painter, Henri is known as a great art teacher. His classes were quite popular at the Art Students League of New York, teaching there between 1915 to 1927. He didn't teach style so much as an attitude toward art, an approach. Among his students during these years were George Bellows, Edward Hopper, and Rockwell Kent.

In his younger days, Robert Henri worked for the Philadelphia Press where he and fellow illustrators William Glackens, George Luks, Everett Shinn and John Sloan forged a friendship, calling their group "The Charcoal Club." The Club was known for its raucous socializing, and readings and discussions of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Emile Zola and Henry David Thoreau.

At this time, Henri believed the time was right for American artists to reject traditional subjects and embrace the thriving and throbbing scenes of American city life.

Art critic Robert Hughes declared, "Henri wanted art to be akin to journalism. He wanted paint to be as real as mud, as the clods of horse-shit and snow, that froze on Broadway in the winter, as real a human product as sweat, carrying the unsuppressed smell of human life." The paintings of New York life done by Henri, Glackens, Luks, Shinn and Sloan became quite popular, and in time the group was dubbed the Ashcan School.

And regardless whether you are an artist or art lover, Henri says you are part of "the brotherhood. "The student is not an isolated force. He belongs to the great

brotherhood, and bears great kinship to his kind. He takes and he gives. He benefits by taking and he benefits by giving."

... The Brotherhood is powerful. It has many members. They are of all places and of all times. The members do not die. One is member to the degree that he can be member, no more, no less. And that part of him that is of the Brotherhood does not die."

Walt Disney admired Robert Henri, and in 1958, he quoted from Henri's book, The Art Spirit as he introduced his well known short film, 4 Artists Paint 1 Tree. While seated at his famous office desk, Walt quotee Henri, "The best advice I have ever given to students who have studied under me has been just this, 'Educate yourself, do not let me educate you.'"

Disney produced 4 Artists Paint 1 Tree to assist young artists who were confused over how to develop their style, whether to imitate others or strive for something else. Walt encouraged his young viewers to listen to Robert Henri's advice, "Don't imitate anyone." Then, with the flip of a page and a twinkle in his eye, Walt gave another Henri gem, "Go forward with what you have to say, expressing things as you see them." Summarizing Henri, Disney encourages young artists to "Be yourself."

Walt then proceeds to introduce four of his studio's "top flight" artists, Marc Davis, Joshua Meador, Eyvind Earle and Walt Peregoy. Walt explains that the four artists are taking a "busman's holiday" to demonstrate four different ways to paint an oak tree, with each artist explaining their technique as they paint. You may view this famous film via a link from our Joshua Meador page.

Below, Ann Japenga relates a tale of a nighttime desert exploration.

Ann Japenga's article, originally published in: California Desert Art .com

"The painter Kathi Hilton Garvin, art dealer Dan Rohlfing and I had just finished dinner at the 29 Palms Inn. The sky was turning pink then blue, like a Technicolor Hilton painting, when Dan suggested that we try to find John Hilton’s old 29 Palms homestead, playhouse to movie stars and desert artists.

As we crammed into my Subaru, I wasn’t so sure about this plan. It was getting dark and no one really knew where we were going except that it was out in nowhere. Dan, co-owner of Bodega Bay Heritage Gallery on the Sonoma Coast, had never been to 29 Palms and Kathi—a former resident–hadn’t been back for 30 years.

We turned off Amboy Road onto a dirt track; the lights of the old five-acre

At Dan’s Bodega Bay gallery, co-owned by his wife Linda Sorensen, customers often prefer Kathi’s pastoral paintings over the work of John Hilton. Still, you can hardly talk about one without the other.

The man mined calcite in Borrego, captured Gila monsters in Baja, sang in Cahuilla and had a poltergeist named Felica. (“Felica was my friend too,” says Kathi.)

His story is told by Katherine Ainsworth in The Man Who Captured Sunshine with the tall tales left unchallenged.

One such tale: Hilton was friends with Cathedral City’s Agnes Pelton, but he was no fan of abstraction in art. To make his point, he once painted a gag Pelton, slapped on the title Cosmic Metamorphosis, and sold it instantly for $350 (or so he said.)

In another bit of stock showmanship, Hilton held a ceremony each year in which he burned his rejected paintings in a big bonfire in Box Canyon. The bonfire routine was not unique to Hilton but was practiced by other theatrical painters such as Tucson’s Ted de Grazia.

Born in North Dakota, Hilton first came to Valerie Jean corner in Thermal in 1931. Valerie Jean’s was the famous date shop where old Route 86 meets Ave. 66. Hilton opened his gem and art shop across the street. The ruins of the gemshop were leveled a few years ago; the date shop building still stands.

Hilton’s first wife was Eunice, a nurse. The couple’s daughter Kathi, named after Katherine Ainsworth, Hilton’s biographer and wife of newspaperman Ed Ainsworth, was born in a Mecca doctor’s office in 1939 and spent her early years in the art and gem shop amidst Chuckwallas, geodes and magnetic rocks.

Her brother, John Philip Hilton, also an artist, died as a young man. Kathi was born into a perpetual party. An early photo taken at the Thermal home and gem shop shows her mom and dad seated on the bed and presiding over an artists’ party. Is that Maynard Dixon in the corner with the black hat? Kathi says she doesn’t know. Dixon was on the scene at the time, but she was just a kid and often hid under the bed while famous painters sang along to John’s guitar.

Of her father’s friend Maynard Dixon all she remembers is: “I loved his voice.” She remembers Clyde Forsythe as the man who brought her peppermint candy. Marjorie Reed was her sometimes-baby sitter. And, yes, for all you desert art gossips, her dad did have a fling with the legendary stagecoach painter.

The PT Barnum of California art, John palled around with guys like Zane Grey, President Dwight Eisenhower (a fellow painter) and General George Patton and was always going off hunting mummies or on other adventures with LA Times reporter Ed Ainsworth.

Hilton’s career was helped along by Ainsworth, author of the classic on the Smoketree School, Painters of the Desert. Hilton supplied the stories Ainsworth needed and in turn Ainsworth gave Hilton and friends ink.

Hilton was also championed by Harriet Day, the influential director of the Desert Inn art gallery and later the Desert Magazine gallery in Palm Desert. (A neighbor of Agnes Pelton, Day also once ran a curio shop and sold Carl Eytel sketches in Palm Springs’ Indian Canyons.)

Hilton moved out of the family home when Kathi was nine; he and Eunice divorced when Kathi was twelve. She didn’t see her father for four years until she showed up unannounced at a show he had at the Palm Springs Museum. His absence had to hurt, but Kathi was stoic as she told the story over dinner in 29 Palms.

Hilton moved to 29 Palms in 1951 after the divorce, choosing the remote town as a place to regroup. He met and married Barbara Hollinger, and became the founding president of the 29 Palms Art Guild and a founder of the 29 Palms Gallery.

Meanwhile Kathi’s youth was itinerant. She went to school briefly in Alamos, Mexico; her dad wrote about those years in his Sonora Sketchbook. She attended the bohemian Desert Sun School in Idyllwild, then a private school in Sherman Oaks, made a foray into modeling in Beverly Hills and took classes at UCLA.

John’s party life continued. There was always revelry going on at the new house in 29 Palms, and though Kathi became friendly with Barbara, she was on the periphery of the scene.

Only after moving to 29 Palms did Kathi finally become a painter herself, despite her dad’s initial discouragement. She was 30 years old at the time and recent spinal surgery had left her immobile and dispirited. Her friend Uta Mark encouraged her to paint

Lee Lukes Pickering–author of Colorful Illusion, a valuable history of the 29 Palms art guild–helped her with colors and convinced her to change her name to Kathi with an “I”. “There’s a lot of Kathy’s out there,” Pickering advised.

When she began painting Kathi found mixing colors came easily to her, a genetic gift.  Her paintings, made with palette knife, oils and fossil wax, looked remarkably like her father’s. “We found out we had the same mind’s eye,” she says proudly.

Kathi’s very first show was at the 29 Palms Gallery in 1970. Her father sent orchids and anthuriums from Maui, where he was living at the time. While initially the senior Hilton had not welcomed her foray into art, he now began to appear in father-daughter shows with her. They even sometimes worked on the same canvas together: a Hilton-Hilton.

After Barbara died in 1976, Hilton charmed a waitress named Janna. Kathi recalls her dad carried gemstones from his gem-collecting days in his pocket and used them to woo women. Yet Janna, Hilton’s new wife, was an unfortunate choice. “She didn’t understand who he was,” says Kathi. When Hilton died in 1983, she discarded his files, photos and letters, a complete history of the Smoketree School of desert art.

Bill Bender, a respected desert artist who lives in Victorville [died 2015], has mixed memories of John Hilton. He sometimes annoyed his friends with his swagger and tendency to hog the spotlight. Yet he brought the impoverished painters needed attention. Painting landscapes is not inherently newsworthy so the desert artists needed a promoter. Hilton was it.

When Bender invited John to Manila and Guam as part of the US Air Force artists program, John took credit for the trip. “As long as he was on stage he was happy,” Bender says. “Still we remained friends right down to the bitter end.”

Kathi Hilton moved to northwestern Utah in the late 1970s and moved into a geodesic dome with her husband, Boyce Garvin. She showed her work widely in the West, exhibiting with the Death Valley 49ers and the Women Artists of the West, among others. Boyce died in 2007; Kathi still lives and paints in the dome.

When Kathi returned to 29 Palms recently after decades away, it was like the reunion scene from the Wizard of Oz.  She held court in the adobe gallery–scene of her very first show–surrounded by her small bronzes of yucca and palms, her own paintings, and a few of John’s. The walls were lush with images of verbena, dunes and smoke trees glowing nearly white.

A parade of indistinct faces approached Kathi. Her smiles dawned slowly as she recognized people from the past. In a greeting typical of others, 29 Palms historian Pat Rimmington said to the artist: “I haven’t seen you for 100 years!”

Along with people from the early days, there were many new devotees who hold the name “Hilton” in near-reverence. Gary Cardiff of Palm Desert asked Kathi to sign his books on the early painters, and also purchased three of her paintings. He told her his grandmother, Pearl “Mona” Stuart, worked in the Desert Magazine gallery, one of the places John Hilton got his start.

As Kathi greeted well-wishers in the crowded room, her father was never far from anyone’s mind. There are photos and a bust of her dad, done by Cyria Henderson of Palm Desert, in the gallery hallway. Even John’s remains are here. When Hilton died Kathi flew her dad’s ashes back home and placed them in a compartment under the bust.

It took many years for Kathi to comes to grips with a disjointed childhood and the overpowering influence of the Man who Captured Sunshine, but in the end the sunshine on display in 29 Palms belonged to her alone. As Desert Magazine said in 1978: “Kathi creates a luminosity of her own.”

Philadelphia , PA
The Philadelphia Museum of Art