Description:
Mountain and stream view of California with pines likely the Sierra's.

Material:
Oil on canvas

Maker/Artist:
William Keith

Date:
c. 1880

Size of Artwork:
17 x 10"

Weight (LBS)
7

Condition:
Unlined, scattered minor in-paint. Period gilt frame, likely original.

History:
William Keith (November 18, 1838 – April 13, 1911) was a Scottish-American painter famous for his California landscapes. He is associated with Tonalism and the American Barbizon school. Although most of his career was spent in California, he started out in New York, made two extended study trips to Europe, and had a studio in Boston in 1871-72 and one in New York in 1880.Keith was born in Oldmeldrum, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, and emigrated to the United States in 1850. He lived in New York City, and became an apprentice wood engraver in 1856. He first traveled to the American West in 1858, after being assigned to do illustrations for Harper's Magazine. He moved to England briefly, working for the London Daily News.Keith moved to California in 1859, settling in San Francisco, where he went into the engraving business. He first studied painting with Samuel Marsden Brookes in 1863, and took watercolor instruction from Elizabeth Emerson, whom he married in 1864. Keith received a commission from the Northern Pacific Railroad in 1868 to paint landscape pictures of scenes along its tracks.He studied art at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in 1869 and 1870. Upon his return to the United States, he shared a studio in Boston with William Hahn from 1871 to 1872.Keith then returned to California, and traveled to Yosemite Valley, with a letter of introduction to John Muir. The two men became deep friends for the next 38 years. Both had been born in Scotland the same year, and they shared a love for the mountains of California. James Mitchell Clarke described their friendship as one "in which deep affection and admiration were expressed through a kind of verbal boxing, counter-jibe answering jibe, counter-insult responding to insult."His first wife Elizabeth died in 1882. In 1883 Keith married Mary McHenry Keith (1855–1947), who was the first female graduate of Hastings Law School and a leading suffragette.In 1888, Keith traveled north with Muir, visiting Mount Shasta and Mount Rainier. Muir encouraged Keith to depict mountain scenery realistically, but as Keith's artistic sense matured, he felt free to depart from geologic reality, placing an imagined glacier or a river in a scene to enhance the beauty of the painting. The two friends argued frequently about such artistic issues.Keith was part of a group of friends of John Muir who met in San Francisco starting in 1889 to support the establishment of Yosemite National Park. This group went on to encourage Muir to establish an association to protect the Sierra Nevada. In 1892, this plan was realized when the Sierra Club was founded.In October 1907, accompanied by Muir, he visited and painted the Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park, soon to be dammed to create a reservoir to provide water and power for San Francisco. Linnie Marsh Wolfe wrote that Keith "left behind all his synthetics of the last twenty-five years and humbly, reverently portrayed what he saw, as objectively as in the seventies when Muir first infused into him his own spirit and vision."William Keith began his career as a follower of the Düsseldorf School and Hudson River School artists, painting large, grandiose landscapes of California. However, over time he turned to a more subjective and poetic view of nature.Keith died in his home in Berkeley, California. He is buried in plot 14b at Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland.