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William Keith - Painter


William Keith was the leading artist in San Francisco at the end of the 19th century. His combination of artistic genius, business acumen, strong personality and hard work enabled him to build a prestigious reputation and a financially successful career.

It was the great naturalist John Muir who called William Keith a "poet-painter" in an article he published in 1875, referring to the poetic quality of Keith's art.

Landscape paintings were often compared to poetry in the 1800s … Keith turned gradually from the objective to the subjective, from accurate depictions of specific places to the use of landscape elements to express and evoke feelings.

Keith's deep love of nature was a common thread throughout his painting career, and one of several bonds between him and John Muir, the founder of the Sierra Club and "father" of the National Parks system.

Both Keith and Muir were born in Scotland in 1838. Keith arrived at Muir's cabin in Yosemite Valley with a letter of introduction in 1872, and a lifelong friendship quickly developed. 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 in encouraging him to reproduce the exact topography and details of the landscape.

In the 1870s Keith had established his reputation in part as a painter of grand panoramic landscapes, often of the High Sierra or other mountainous country, and sometimes as large as six by ten feet. This type of painting could serve as a document of a specific locale and as an homage to divine creation in the form of the impressive American wilderness," and specifically the California Backcountry.

(Excerpt from William Keith California's Poet-Painter 1838-1911, an exhibit at Saint Mary's College of California)

Keith traveled to Europe and the East Coast several times in the late 1800s and was heavily influenced by seeing and learning from the Impressionist painters of the time. Upon his return to California, his work became more suggestive of the landscape, less concerned with exact duplication of the landscape, and more focused on evoking the feeling of the place, rather than a strict picture of the place.