An early oil painting by Reba Dickerson-Hill

At auction, artwork is always the first draw for me. I immediately head over to the paintings to first see an image that transfixes me and then an artist’s name that I recognize. Finding new and old African American artists was the reason I first started going to auctions.

I was perusing the artwork at one auction house recently when my eyes stopped on an indistinct landscape. It was more folk art than fine art – the scene rustic, the oil paint thickly applied.

I looked at the name and instantly recognized it: R. Dickerson Hill.

Reba Dickerson-Hill was a Philadelphia African American artist who built her reputation on a Japanese block ink painting process called Sumi-e. I have a watercolor by her – titled “Duck Blind” – in that medium, which is nothing like the oil painting I was looking at. I wondered if it was artwork from her early years.

The oil on canvas seemingly illustrated how Dickerson-Hill had developed as an artist. Artists sometimes undergo a metamorphosis, when their style changes and their works become demonstratively different. Some styles change so dramatically over an artist’s lifetime that their works appear to be those of more than one person.

Several years ago, I attended an exhibit of works by one of my favorite artists, Lois Mailou Jones. The pieces were spread out over several rooms at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC. As I walked into each room of this retrospective of her life, it was like viewing the works of five distinct artists. All the phases of Jones’ life were offered in a very interesting visual autobiography.

Was this oil by Dickerson-Hill from an early part of her life?

I had never seen any of her oils before so I went looking for others on the web, particularly to try to determine in what time period this one was painted. I could find out little about Dickerson-Hill’s life as an artist. Here’s a photo of her on the Chestnut Hill Historical Society website.

Her repertoire consisted primarily of watercolors, although she did produce works in other mediums, including acrylics, pen and ink, collages and sculptures. Sumi-e apparently was her favorite, and she was said to perhaps be the first African American artist who became well-known in that medium.

Dickerson-Hill was an elementary school teacher (she graduated from and later taught fine art at Cheyney University, which has some of her works) who retired in the 1960s, according to her obituary (she died in 1994). She learned the art of Sumi-e from Ramon Fina, a Spanish diplomat the West Philadelphia girl met as a child, according to her daughter. In the 1940s, Dickerson-Hill was also a student of African American artist Claude Clark, according to a story about that artist.

A 1940 article in the Baltimore Afro American newspaper about Cheyney graduates noted that “Miss Reba T. Dickerson, who is an artist, plans to make that her profession.” The article includes a photos of female graduates of Cheyney State Teachers College, its name at the time.

In the obituary, Dickerson-Hill’s daughter Reba Mayo described her as an artist who readily accepted her calling: “She was one of those artists who had to be, not because she wanted to be. She was compelled to be focused on her work.”

Dickerson-Hill’s works can be found in international collections, and she has been represented in several exhibitions of national and local artists. She also has received honors from the Sumi-e Society of America, along with others.

In a 1996 exhibit of the works of Dickerson-Hill and artist Ellen Powell Tiberino at the Esther M. Klein Art Gallery in Philadelphia, Dickerson-Hill’s works included those employing Sumi-e in both the “traditional black and white … to full colors blending Japanese ink technique with Western watercolor.” The earliest work at that show was a 1961 pen and ink drawing of a bearded man.

She was also among more than 100 of the country’s major African American artists in a 1969 exhibit sponsored by the School District and the Museum of the Philadelphia Civic Center titled “Afro-American Artists, 1800-1969.” She was listed as Reba Dickerson.

I found several of Dickerson-Hill’s watercolors on the web, but only one oil painting and it resembled the one at auction. Titled “Windswept Land,” it was dated 1963 and was part of an exhibit at the Allens Lane Art Center’s ADVAC show in Philadelphia. The piece was not for sale at that exhibit (no date was mentioned), but it sold at auction in 2009.

I suspect that the landscape oil painting I bought at auction is also from the 1960s.