William Keith
Scottish, 1839-1911 (active USA)

Loma Prieta, Morning in the Santa Cruz Mountains, 1874
oil on canvas
40 1/8 x 72 3/8 in.

SBMA, Gift of the Bard Family in memory of Beryl Bard
1960.48



Portrait of Keith in a side pose, photograph by W. E. Dassomniu, 1909

"My subjective pictures are the ones that come from the inside. I feel some emotion and I immediately paint a picture that expresses it. The sentiment is the only thing of real value in my pictures, and only a few people understand that." - William Keith

RESEARCH PAPER

At the time Keith painted this work, 1874, he had been influenced by Thomas Cole and Asher Durand of the Hudson River School. Cole's paintings are described as Romantic and Sublime. He created his compositions in his studio from his nature sketches. Durand, on the other hand, was one of the Hudson River School painters to paint directly from nature. He tried to represent nature exactly as it was.

Keith was also aware of the Barbizon painters, the first true "plein-air" painters, from the enthusiasm of William Morris Hunt, who had returned to America in 1854 after two years at Barbizon, where he had been a very good friend of Jean François Millet; and also through his close friendship with George Inness, who also was deeply committed to the Barbizon idiom, and created landscapes of mood and poetry.

Impressionism had not yet reached America from France, for, indeed, 1874 was the year of the very first Impressionist exhibition, held in Paris.

Keith was born in Scotland to a distinguished family. His father was a descendant of a close friend of Frederick the Great of Prussia. When his father died Keith's family moved to America. Keith was 12. He apprenticed to a coach painter. In this period he won a prize for a painting. Then he apprenticed to a wood engraver, leading to doing woodcut illustrations for Harper's Weekly until 1859. In 1859 he came to the western U.S., not in search of gold, but of the "jeweled landscapes" he had heard about. He preferred the valleys, streams, and in later life, the live-oak trees.

By doing advertising paintings for the Northern Pacific Railroad he earned enough to return to Europe, where he studied at Düsseldorf, as did many other American artists. That was in 1869-70. He returned to the U.S. and was an immediate success. He had married an artist in 1865, Elizabeth Emerson, a relative of Ralph Waldo Emerson; and on his return they often painted together, and frequently exhibited together. She died in 1882. His second wife was a suffragette.

Before considering his life after 1874, let us look at Loma Prieta, Morning in the Santa Cruz Mountains, 1874.

This is not a vast panorama, but great distance is indicated, ranging from very close foreground, middle foreground, middle distance to a far, far horizon seen only indis­tinctly. Distance effect is achieved by aerial perspective devices: diminishing hue intensity, color values lightening with distance until they become a haze, and the sharp resolution of texture and image of the foreground gradually losing these properties in the distance. Distance is also achieved by linear perspective in the sense that relative sizes of objects are represented smaller and smaller as they recede from the viewer. In particular, notice the trees, and also the relative sizes of the human figures and cows compared to our common experience of these sizes if side by side.

The colors Keith has used create an exhilerating excitement. He always experimented with the effects of light, anticipating both French and American Impressionists. The scene is back-lighted by the sun, forming a curving diagonal shaft of yellow light from behind the large trees at the right, dropping under the bridge and sweeping upward just before it reaches the lower left corner of the picture. The afternoon light gives warmth and affects the whole composition. The mountain is painted a tint of violet with long, flat brush strokes, quite visible. This same hue is repeated in the same intensity in some of the larger foreground rocks at the right, thus introducing a slighnt amibiguity of distance. The violet is, except in intensity, a complement of some parts of the yellow shaft of sunlight mentioned, thus adding a subtle accent of brilliance. Another set of complementary colors is the red-green presence. There is a saturated red in the clothing of the woman on the bridge, as well as a speck of it on her companion's, and this is reflected in the water below. (There are shades of red in the tree trunks and on the cows.) The intense red is complementary to the somewhat unnatural (for foliage) green of the large trees at right and left. Keith's, palette includes the three primary colors: red, yellow and blue. The blue of the sky also includes the secondary colors: green, violet and orange. Orange was not previously referred to, but it occurs in various shades in the many browns of the painting. There are no true blacks, for even the clothing of the women on the bridge, seen at first as black, turns out to be very, very dark brown. The palette, is not essentially different than that of the Impressionists, whom he had presumably not yet encountered.

Notwithstanding the relative smoothness with which he painted the mountain and sky, the general feeling persists that there is a great deal of texture in the low, impasto application of paint in the foreground areas. Here he has used short brush strokes, in assorted directions, very much as if he were an Impressionist. The tiny spots of white, yellow and yellow green scattered through the green trees makes them shimmer with light - it would have to be light reflected from the sky, as they are backlighted objects. The rendering of the bridge reflection in the water, this of sunlit areas, is very reminiscent of Impressionist methods.

The linear skeleton of the painting makes it a closed composition and invites our eye irresistably to explore its content. The skeleton has three geometric patterns. First, the shape of the mountain is repeated in size and shape by the contour of the widening pool of the stream in the foreground. Second, the same contour of the stream is repeated upside down in the profile of the foreground areas against the mountain and sky, creating an hour-glass shape lying on its side. And third is a large oval shape that encloses the mountain on the top of the oval, defined on its sides by the sloping lines of the large tree trunks plus the strong tree shadows near the lower left which sweep the eye across the water along and past the tops of the two cows.

Having completed the analysis this far, a strong psychological effect starts to take hold of the viewer. The rhythm of repeated arcs, the leftward slant of the trunks of the trees on both sides of the painting, begin to suggest a ballet. Other forms literally pop into view. As a counterpoint to the arcs and diagonals an awareness is born of a myriad of short vertical forms, spaced very much like notes on a musical staff, in the shapes of the trees in and below the upper curve of our hour-glass, and again along the surface of the bridge, including the human figures themselves. We can also discern well-defined horizontal lines, of which, of course, the bridge is the most prominent. And the center of all this, the shrubbery becomes a dancing, topiary carnival.

In researching Keith's later life we learn that he actually painted live oaks in a manner which has been described as "portrayals almost animistic." It was also told of Keith that when someone gave him a Japanese gong, he painted a series known as the "Gong Series." He would strike the gong gently on the edge with a leather-covered striker and exclaim, "Listen to that. Did you ever hear the like? Fine, isn't it? I can see pictures in that." Then the narrator: "And certainly one might see anything in it. The sound scaled the heights to the clouds, and descended to the foundations of things. As I lay on the carpet with my ears to the edge, I could hear the deepest thunder, the roar of the sea; the voices of flowers, the birds and the stars. Keith's eyes lighted up and moistened, and I could see his whole soul awakened as the sound rolled and echoed, and re-echoed throughout the room." Keith: "Isn't it wonderful? Now I want to paint! They always make me see pictures and hear songs. It reminds me of Tuolumne meadows up in the Sierras. I have heard every sound of nature there: songs in the night, bands, orchestras, overtures, sweet symphonies, crashing choruses - everything, even bagpipes. That's where music comes from. Everything has its origin in nature." Keith did similar experiments with a set of metal tubes from India.

At one point in his later years Keith came under the influence of a Rev. Joseph Worcester, pastor of the Swedenborgian Church of San Francisco. Through Worcester, the poetic and mystic side of Keith's nature asserted itself, and he became even more a subjective interpreter of nature's moods.

In 1906 the big San Francisco earthquake struck. Keith's studio was there, but he was at his home in Oakland. Rev. Worcester had a key to the studio, and the day of the earthquake he looked in on the studio and found it at shambles. He took with him 26 of the best paintings - there were many hundreds - to protect them, and these were saved. The next day the fire had spread and it consumed the studio and all its paintings, including a complete set of the California Missions paintings.

There are a number of conflicting reports about Keith. For instance, by some he has been referred to as a true plein-air painter; while others insist that the thousands of pastoral and woodland scenes he painted were done in his studio from the woodland sketches he had made. Some blame the darkening of some of his paintings on his use of bitumen; others report that Keith used glazes to excess, being fond of their glossy effect, and, that it is the glazes that caused the darkening. Apparently Keith did use bitumen very briefly in some of his portraiture, but not in his landscapes.

Keith was enormously liked by his fellow artists, and he enjoyed the patronage of kings, financiers, railway magnates, great shipbuilders. He was an intimate of the naturalist, John Burrows, and as an official painter, accompanied John Muir into the high Sierras, and illustrated Muir's book, Picturesque California. He exhibited in Paris and London, but he was generally opposed to exhibiting; and he disliked selling through art dealers, thus missing the advantage an art dealer would have given him. Still, he was the best known 19th century California painter in his day, and his works are owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the Boston Museum of Art, The Corcoran and National Galleries in Washington, D.C., and the art museum in Frankfort, Germany, as well as a number of other great museums. He taught at the Mark Hopkins School of Design, and when that institution changed its name to the San Francisco Art Association, he became its director.

Keith once said, "The sentiment is the only real value in my pictures, and only a few people understand that." He was capable of showing nature's grandeur in a panoramic way; but he also showed nature's charm by his sensitive glimpses of a pool of water or a clump of trees. His deepest shadows carried all the necessary detail, and in his lights were all the luminosity of color simply stated. He was a prolific painter; but his reputation suffered in his later years when his work became very uneven, and he painted a great deal from memory. His reputation was also damaged by the appearance of many fraudulent paintings attributed to him. He was the first California landscape artist to achieve success by reason of the subjective quality of his painting; yet the titles he assigned to his paintings often distracted from the presentation.

Prepared for the Santa Barbara Museum of Art Docent Council by William R. Jennings, October 29, 1981

Bibliography (in the SBMA Library)

Hailey, Gene. WILLIAM KEITH 1839-1911. Biography and Works.
California Art Research, Vol 2, First Series, Dec 1936.
Mills, Paul. AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ART OF WILLIAM KEITH. Oakland Art Museum, 1956.