Seeing his paintings made into a series of at least 30 posters must have been a heady experience for Bern Hill. Yet his output experienced a major decline in 1953, with just seven covers on Railway Age, or eight if he did the Christmas cover.
All images are from the Palumbo collection. Click image to download a 2.1-MB PDF of this magazine cover. Click here to download an 11.1-MB higher-resolution PDF of this image.
Over the course of the year, Hill’s paintings moved away from the grandiose landscapes that dwarfed the trains to more traditional advertising images focusing on the locomotives themselves. The last two paintings of the year were hardly different from the ones GM was using before 1950.
Click image to download a 1.7-MB PDF of this magazine cover. Click here to download a 7.0-MB higher-resolution PDF of this image.
According to Palumbo, EMD’s PR department loved Hill’s paintings. But people in the engineering and styling departments were less fond of them. The engineers was upset that Hill took so many liberties with the images of their products. The styling department had its own artists who wondered why Hill got so much attention when their own work was more accurate.
Click image to download a 2.1-MB PDF of this magazine cover. Click here to download a 9.0-MB higher-resolution PDF of this image.
In 1953, GM interspersed Hill’s paintings with ads that used something of a comic strip format. The ads usually had four panels populated with cartoon like characters making some point about the advantages of GM products. The images were unsigned but it doesn’t seem likely that they were painted by Hill.
Click image to download a 2.3-MB PDF of this magazine cover. Click here to download a 10.2-MB higher-resolution PDF of this image.
I’ve posted two examples here and here. The first argues that General Motors packages its parts better than other manufacturers while the second touts the advantages of Dieselization.
Click image to download a 1.9-MB PDF of this magazine cover. Click here to download a 7.9-MB higher-resolution PDF of this image.
In any case, it appears that Hill was pressured to depart from the style of paintings that made the posters so attractive and make more traditional illustrations of GM’s products such as those shown below. Both of the images below are clearly signed Bern Hill. While I can’t find a signature on the previous image of a Pennsylvania Railroad passenger train, it is clearly Hill’s style.
Click image to download a 2.8-MB PDF of this magazine cover. Click here to download an 11.4-MB higher-resolution PDF of this image.
This painting of a Nickel Plate switch engine is signed Bern Hill.
Click image to download a 1.7-MB PDF of this magazine cover. Because Google’s images of this cover were all black-and-white, I photographed this cover at the U of O library.
Hill did the 1950 through 1952 Christmas covers, so it is a good bet that he did this one as well despite the lack of signature. Hill’s close-up views of locomotives such as the cover that appeared a week after this one (below) shows that his images have the right shapes and colors but tend to lack details such as rivets, hatch covers, and so forth. The locomotive in this Christmas picture looks exactly like that, so while the cartoonish Santa appears out of character, I’m pretty sure that Hill did this cover.
Click image to download a 2.5-MB PDF of this magazine cover. Click here to download a 10.9-MB higher-resolution PDF of this image.
The painting on this cover is signed Bern Hill at the lower left.