page_title: Laura Coombs Hills
section_title: Watercolors and pastels
hierarchical_section_title: Laura Coombs Hills / Art career / Watercolors and pastels
caption_attribution_description: English: Laura Coombs Hills, Portrait of Mrs. T., miniature painted on ivory ca. 1899.
context_page_description: Laura Coombs Hills was an American artist and illustrator who specialized in watercolor and pastel still life paintings, especially of flowers, and miniature portrait paintings on ivory. She became the first miniature painter elected to the Society of American Artists, and she was a founder of the American Society of Miniature Painters. She also worked as a designer and illustrated children's books for authors such as Kate Douglas Wiggin and Anna M. Pratt.
context_section_description: In the 1880s, Hills painted a group of landscapes in oil that were clearly influenced by the Barbizon school; they also show influence from the work of Knowlton. In general, her mature paintings align with the romanticized Impressionism of Boston School painters like  Edmund C. Tarbell, while her design work shows strong kinship with Art Nouveau. She was an early member of the Guild of Boston Artists, and her work was included in a 2001 retrospective show "A Woman's Perspective: Founding and Early Women Members of the Guild of Boston Artists, 1914–1945."
  Hills came to prefer watercolor and pastel to oils even though these media were at the time considered suitable only for preliminary work and were not often exhibited.  This situation began to change early in Hills' career, spurred in part by the founding of national and local watercolor and pastel societies in the late 1800s. Hills had her first solo exhibition in 1889 at the J. Eastman Chase Gallery in Boston, showing a group of pastel landscapes and still lifes.  The following year, she showed work at the Boston Water Color Club's Fourth Annual Exhibition, which was also held at the Chase Gallery. She exhibited watercolors and pastels throughout her career, and focused on pastels in her later years as her eyesight began to fail.
  Hills specialized in painting vividly colored tabletop arrangements of flowers that she mostly grew in her own garden in Newburyport, and one contemporary reviewer referred to her as the "Queen of Flower Painters" (likewise as the "Queen of Miniature Painters": on which point, see below). A pastel entitled Larkspur, Peonies, and Canterbury Bells that the Boston Museum of Fine Arts bought in 1926 has consistently been the best-selling image in the museum's gift shop.
caption: Laura Coombs Hills, Portrait of Mrs. T., miniature painted on ivory ca. 1899.
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