Born in Wolverhampton, England in 1843, Edward Hill was the ninth of ten children. Though ultimately less well known than his older brother Thomas Hill (1829-1908), Edward was a productive painter in oil and watercolor for more than sixty years, producing images of the White Mountains of New Hampshire, southern genre scenes, still-life paintings, portraits, American Indian pictures, and western views.
His paintings are widely collected and are represented in museums as diverse as the Hood Museum at Dartmouth College, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, and the Denver Art Museum.
The Hill family moved to Taunton, Massachusetts less than a year after Edward's birth. With his brother Thomas, Edward worked as a furniture painter with firms in Massachusetts for several years, and he shared Thomas' studio in San Francisco in 1862-63 and again in 1872. Edward would be a constant traveler throughout his long career, shuttling for various lengths of time not only between New England and California, but to regions from the American South to the Pacific Northwest.
By the early 1880s Hill's financial success and artistic reputation were well established, largely on the strength of his paintings of the White Mountains. Ever restless and in search of new imagery, however, he also lived and worked at times in Colorado, Utah, and elsewhere in the Southwest throughout the last two decades of the century and the first decade of the next. From 1911 to his death in 1923, the artist lived and painted primarily in the Pacific Northwest.
Hill's paintings are diverse in character, in response both to the changing landscapes he experienced and to the changing influences of the artistic times. Lighter, brighter, and slightly more impressionistic in his later career, his canvases remained topographically accurate, and he was unusually receptive among the landscape painters of his day to inclusion of specific human activities in his work.