Bertha von Hillern

Bertha von Hillern (4 August 1853, Trier, Prussian Rhineland – 19 September 1939, Staunton, Virginia) was a German-American athlete and artist.

Biography

Von Hillern emigrated to the United States in 1877. For two years, she devoted her time to advocating athletic exercises for women, and appearing in public as a competition pedestrian. She also gave demonstrations of bicycle riding. She gave up her public pedestrian activities to devote herself to the study of art, and later pursued art as a profession in Boston, where she exhibited a large number of landscapes in 1888.

Florida newspapers reported that in the 1880s von Hillern shared an atelier there for some years with an artist from Maine, Maria Graves Beckett, who signed her work “Maria J. C. à Becket.” Both women had been students of William Morris Hunt in Boston. She later lived in Richmond and Winchester, Virginia.

Works

• “The Monk Felix,” from Longfellow's “Golden Legend”
• “Evening Prayer at the Wayside Shrine, Germany” (1883)
• “The Conversion of the Heathen General Placidus, by a Miracle while Hunting” (1885)
• “Live-Oak Forest in the Ojai Valley, California” (1887)
• “St. Paul, the First Hermit”
• “A Walk through the Pine Barrens, Florida” (1888)