Note
User Text: Born in Porter County, Indiana, Andrew Putnam Hill came to California with his family in 1867 and settled in San Jose. He studied at Santa Clara College before moving to San Francisco to study art at the California School of Design. He also took private lessons from Virgilio Tojetti and Louis Lussier. Hill and Lussier became partners in 1876, opening a portrait-painting studio in Oakland and then San Jose. In 1882, Hill partnered with watercolorist Sydney Yard in a photography business. Today he is best remembered as a conservationist who helped make Big Basin Redwoods State Park, northwest of Santa Cruz, the first redwood state park.
Hill produced this painting at age 23 as a commission for George W. Hoag, who hired him to depict his record wheat harvest. Working on 10,000 acres of land that he leased from Dr. Hugh Glenn, the major landholder of Colusa County (northwest of Sacramento), Hoag employed a large staff of machinists and blacksmiths to manufacture equipment that could plant and harvest at top speeds. He was especially proud of his immense wheat separator, the Monitor, which on August 8, 1874, threshed 3,504 sacks of wheat (approximately 5,800 bushels) in a contest with the Baylis family, whose team threshed only 2,440 sacks.
To keep up with the Monitor, Hoag needed seventy men, seven headers, and twenty-four header wagons, which Hill painted in careful detail from sketches and photographs. The bright red Monitor and steam engine are ringed by laborers, many of them Chinese. Hoag is shown in the central foreground in a black buggy pulled by a handsome team of horses. The Pacific Rural Press described the painting as “a stirring scene,” of the “magnificent in our agriculture.”1
1 “California Harvest Scene—Dr. Glenn’s Farm in Colusa County,” San Francisco Pacific Rural Press, 6 May 1876.