page_title: William Keith (artist)
section_title: Later years
hierarchical_section_title: William Keith (artist) / Later years
caption_attribution_description: A bust of California painter William Keith by Gertrude Boyle, 1904. On display at the St. Mary's College Museum of Art. Photo by Jim Heaphy.
context_page_description: William Keith 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.
context_section_description: From the late 1880s on, Keith painted primarily in a subjective vein in which his emotional and spiritual reactions to the landscape were more important than topographical facts. He painted many woodland views that resembled those of Théodore Rousseau and other Barbizon painters, as well as the American painter George Inness. Inness came to visit the San Francisco Bay Area in 1891. He and Keith painted together, and Keith felt he was learning a lot and regaining an enthusiasm for painting that he had begun to lose. Inness's fame and enthusiasm for Keith's work gave a substantial boost to sales of Keith's paintings.
  Keith's San Francisco studio was destroyed as a result of the fires following the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, which resulted in the loss of many paintings, with some accounts placing the number at several thousand.  Keith, who was working primarily from his Berkeley studio-home, promised to replace all of the lost paintings despite his declining health. He remained a revered but reclusive figure in the large Berkeley art colony and refused to participate in the founding of the Berkeley Art Association in 1907.  He consistently contributed paintings to the colony's exhibitions between 1906 and 1911. In the summer of 1906 he briefly appeared in public to support Harry W. Seawell, a drawing instructor at the University of California, in what became an embarrassing scandal.  When the University forbade Seawell from using nude models in his life classes, Keith published a blunt declaration of support in the local press, proclaiming that the nude model is "essential to real art."
  Keith did not entirely abandon realistic depictions of mountain scenery. In October 1907, accompanied by Muir, Keith 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."  Keith expressed great annoyance with the many high-quality forgeries of his work on the San Francisco market.
caption: Bust of Keith in 1904 by Gertrude Boyle
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