With delicate brush strokes, one artist captured the beautiful,
sweeping vistas of California’s unspoiled landscape, including
parts of the South Valley area nearly 150 years ago.
With delicate brush strokes, one artist captured the beautiful, sweeping vistas of California’s unspoiled landscape, including parts of the South Valley area nearly 150 years ago.
William Keith was considered the most accomplished and successful landscape painter in California during the 19th century and was the leading artist in San Francisco at the turn of the century.
Born in Aberdeen, Scotland, Keith settled permanently in San Francisco in 1859. He traveled throughout California preserving forever hundreds of the state’s best-known landmarks on canvas, art historian Alfred Harrison with the Northpoint Gallery in San Francisco said.
Harrison, considered an expert on Keith and his work, said the artist’s paintings so moved people that he became known as the “poet-painter.”
“That was because he was able to instill a real emotional content in the paintings he created,” Harrison said.
In fact, it was revered naturalist John Muir who is said to have first given Keith the title “poet-painter,” referring to a poetic quality in Keith’s art.
A contemporary with Muir, Keith arrived at Muir’s cabin in the Yosemite Valley with a letter of introduction in 1872, sparking a close lifelong friendship.
They took camping trips
together in the High Sierra, saw each other when Muir was in the San Francisco area and helped inspire each
other’s work. Muir’s concern with scientific accuracy probably reinforced Keith’s early training as a wood engraver, Harrison said.
Keith and Muir, who shared a love for California’s natural beauty, were among the first to call for a preservation of the state’s
resources. Harrison said it was Keith’s paintings and other efforts that helped
save the Hetch-Hetchy River.
Landscape paintings often were compared to poetry in
the 19th century with a variety of meanings. In
retrospect, most people today would see Keith’s later works, like the ones prominent New York art collector, architect Charles F. McKim, who once
traveled all the way to
California to buy, would have seen in 1905, as more “poetic” than the types of paintings Muir admired in 1875.
One such work during that
period was an oil painting in 1874 of the Pacheco Pass. The colorful landscape depicted a trader with a pair of pack animals walking along the well-traveled dirt trail through a lightly oak-studded countryside that in no way resembles the major automobile thoroughfare that the pass is today.
A similar painting in 1869, titled the “Polegus Ranch Gate,” created a powerful vision of the vast unspoiled countryside surrounding a ranch just north of where Morgan Hill is today.
The oil-on-canvas work is currently part of a national tour of Keith’s works.
Although Keith was best known in California, his artistic achievements were acknowledged in East Coast newspapers as early as 1872, when he had a studio in Boston for several months.
Keith’s personal hunger to continually improve his skills led him to take two trips to Europe. The visits, each connected by trips to the eastern United States, had strong effects on Keith’s artistic development.
On his first trip in 1869, three years after he first began exhibiting and selling paintings, he left San Francisco for visits to New York and Paris and to study art in Dusseldorf, Germany.
When Keith returned to California in 1872, his painting style had changed noticeably. His use of foreground detail, typical of his earlier works, was replaced by looser, sketchier brushstrokes with more attention to the majesty and magnitude of the subjects he captured.
However, Keith never surrendered his belief in the philosophy that art must be a faithful rendering of nature. He became enthusiastic about a more “suggestive” approach to capturing the natural world on canvas.
Keith took a second trip to Europe, primarily to the area around Munich, in 1883 to 1885. There he again engaged mostly in self-directed study, focusing on portrait work. He was later commissioned to paint portraits of various prominent Californians, but his mainstay continued to be landscape.
This type of painting often served as both a pictorial document forever capturing the unspoiled look of a specific area and as an homage to divine creation in the form of the impressive American wilderness. By the 1890s, Keith typically was painting forest glades at sunset with other kinds of religious overtones.
Keith believed that his late, dark, indistinct works better suggested that spiritual reality went beyond the superficial forms of nature.
By the early 1870s, he had built a respected reputation in part as a painter of sweeping panoramic vistas, often of the High Sierra or other mountainous country – several of which were as large as 6 by 10 feet. His clear, crisp, monumental vistas were a common sight in the homes of San Francisco’s wealthy elite.
In 1907, it was reported that Keith’s income reached nearly $100,000 a year as demands for his paintings continued to grow.
It has long been rumored that as many as 2,000 of Keith’s paintings were lost in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. However, Harrison said there is no truth to the rumor.
“There were a number of Keith’s works destroyed, but most of those were sketches and test drawings,” he said. “Nearly all of his major works were saved.”
Four years after his death at age 73 an entire room was devoted to Keith’s work at the 1915 Pan-Pacific International Exhibition in San Francisco.
Keith gradually turned from the objective to the subjective, from accurate descriptions of specific places to the use of landscape elements to express and evoke feelings. However, his deep love of nature was a common thread throughout his painting career.
A former professor of art at Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, Brother Cornelius, an avid mountaineer who was also a big fan of Keith’s work, wrote a 900-page biography of Keith’s life titled “The life and Works of William Keith.” He also collected more than 100 of his paintings for the college during a 30-year period that laid the foundation for the college’s Hearst Art Gallery and the permanent Keith Room. A rotating number of those artworks is being loaned out to museums across the country. One group of these works are in the middle of a three-year tour throughout the East Coast and the Central United States.
Heidi Donner of the Hearst Art Gallery and the Northpoint Gallery contributed to this report.
