Painting alludes to Pittsburgh's working class
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Roy Hilton works on a canvas in 1953. He once told a reporter he had never owned an artist's smock.
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Roy Hilton was new to town when he painted "Winter Day" in the late 1920s. As with many realist artists here, he was smitten with the rolling urban landscape even as it was transformed under a blanket of snow. "Winter Day" incorporates the traditional elements of a picturesque Pittsburgh scene: hillside houses, a bridge, a flight of city steps.
But did Mr. Hilton paint what he saw, or simply what he imagined?
For the fifth consecutive year, the Post-Gazette features a winter-scene painting on the cover of the Christmas Day newspaper. This year's painting was selected by PG publisher John Robinson Block and executive editor David Shribman during a visit to the Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg, which has owned "Winter Day" since 2000.
Touring as part of the museum's "Born of Fire: The Valley of Work" exhibit of 2006, "Winter Day" has been on the road the past three years, hanging in museums throughout Germany and in Zabrze, Poland.
"I included 'Winter Day' in 'Born of Fire' because it showed a typical neighborhood of Pittsburgh, alluding to the workers, and those steps leading to the homes on the hillside, sometimes the inhabitants' only access to them. I included it in a section called 'The Human Condition,' " said Westmoreland Museum chief curator Barbara Jones, who organized "Born of Fire."
Two weeks ago, "Born of Fire" came home; "Winter Day" is on view in the Westmoreland's lobby through Jan. 31, after which it will join the reinstallation of the major "Born of Fire" works in the museum's Barclay Gallery. The museum also owns Mr. Hilton's "Pittsburgh Mills," an undated painting dominated by a pair of towering blast furnaces.
Under gallery lighting, the hilltop snow in "Winter Day" takes on a luminous glow; the painting seems to have its own inner light. Still, it doesn't feel like daytime. The forces of darkness -- a glowering sky and Pittsburgh's industrial soot -- have residents already turning on their lights. Outhouses on the hillside are another reminder of how earlier generations lived here.
First Published December 25, 2010 12:00 am
