Biography of William Keith

(1838 - 1911)

Biography

William Keith (November 18, 1838 – April 13, 1911) was a Scottish-American painter famous for his California landscapes.

Early life

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.

California

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 his wife, Elizabeth Emerson, whom he married in 1864.[1] Keith received a commission from the Northern Pacific Railroad in 1868 to paint landscape pictures of scenes along its tracks.

He studied art in Düsseldorf, Germany in 1869 and 1870. Upon his return to the United States, he shared a studio in Boston with William Hahn from 1871 to 1872.[2]

Friendship with John Muir

Keith then returned to California, and travelled 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."[3]

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.[4]

In 1888, Keith travelled 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.[5]

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.[6]

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."[7]

Painting Style

William Keith began his career as a follower of the Hudson River School artists, painting large, grandiose landscapes of California. However, according to the art writer Jeffrey Morseburg, "he turned from a romantic approach to a more subjective and poetic view of nature and he seems to be the only notable California painter who made this type of transformation."

Death

Keith died in his home in Berkeley, California. He is buried in plot 14b at Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland.[4]

Legacy

· The Hearst Art Gallery at Saint Mary's College of California in Moraga owns 170 paintings by William Keith. Two thematic exhibitions of his work are held each year.[9]

· Keith Avenue in Berkeley was named after William Keith.[10]

· Mount Keith was named after William Keith by Helen Gompertz (later Helen LeConte) in July 1896.[11]

· San Francisco Mayor Edward Robeson Taylor published an 1898 book of sonnets based on Keith's paintings. [12]

References

1. ^ "Taos & Santa Fe Painters: William Keith (1838 - 1911)". Retrieved 9 September 2010.

2. ^ Trainer, Laureen (2006). Scott, Amy. ed. Yosemite: Art of an American Icon. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press. pp. 201. ISBN 0-520-24922-4.

3. ^ Clarke, James Mitchell (1980). The Life and Adventures of John Muir. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books. pp. 112. ISBN 87156-241-3.