William Keith
William Keith
1839 - 1911
American painter of Scottish birth. He arrived in New York as a boy in 1850 and was hired as a wood-engraver by the publishing firm of Harper & Brothers in 1857. In 1859 he established himself as a wood-engraver in San Francisco. Keith soon began to make watercolours of the state’s spectacular mountain scenery, and in 1868 he turned to oil painting. After spending two years (1870–72) travelling first to Düsseldorf, where he admired the landscapes of Andreas Achenbach (1815–1910), then to Paris, where he saw the work of the Barbizon painters, and to New York and Boston, he returned to the American West. There he travelled widely during the next decade with the photographer Carleton E. Watkins and the naturalist and conservationist John Muir (1838–1914). From 1883 to 1885 Keith studied informally in Munich; he returned to Europe in 1893 and 1899. In the mid-1880s he was influenced by the philosophical teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772); in response his art moved progressively from the light-filled panoramas of Californian mountains, as in Headwaters of the San Joaquin (1878; Oakland, CA, Mus.), to atmospheric renderings of haze-filled meadows and oak groves, as in Glory of the Heavens (1891; San Francisco, CA, F.A. Museums). Keith’s later paintings, constructed with complicated scumbles and glazes, became more suggestive of a mood than descriptive of a particular place. A prolific artist until only months before his death, Keith lost over 2000 paintings when his studio in San Francisco burnt down following the earthquake of 1906. [Marc Simpson. "Keith, William." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 9, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T046173.]
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