William Keith

(1838-1911)

Kings River 34 x 56in framed 42 x 63in

Footnotes

Provenance
Private collection, San Francisco, California.

Exhibited
Omaha, Nebraska, Legends of the West: The Foxley Collection, Joslyn Art Museum, November 11, 2006 - February 25, 2007.

Literature
J. Brooks Joyner, Legends of the West: The Foxley Collection, Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska, 2006, pl. 36, p. 58, illustrated.

William Keith paid attention to international and national trends. He traveled extensively and was a savvy businessman within his chosen profession. He knew that the approach of artists like Albert Bierstadt and other Hudson River School style painters were falling out of fashion in the last quarter of the 19th century. Many movements were growing in popularity in America especially the Barbizon school. As Alfred Harrison writes in The Comprehensive Keith, it was beginning in the 1870s that Keith compromised—"He borrowed the broader rougher style of the Barbizon movement and applied it to Hudson River school subjects like Yosemite and Coast Range mountains and that way he tried to give a more modern look and a new life to an outdated aesthetic." ¹

Unfortunately, this transition did not agree with the sentiments of one of Keith's oldest friends and collaborators, John Muir. Over the course of decades they made numerous trips in California and further afield. At times these were for specific projects like California Grandeur for which Keith contributed four illustrations, and at others, Muir was taking Keith to new territory. Keith's compromise was not to Muir's liking. Muir wanted detail while Keith was interested in capturing more than the specifics of a landscape. Both men were clearly profoundly affected by the wilderness but unlike the crusading Muir, William Keith's vision and depictions evolved.

Kings River blends the atmospheric ethos of the Barbizon painters with some of the dramatic elements of the Hudson River school. The composition is a set of two opposing V shapes. The sky and the water mirror each other on the vertical axis with areas of landscape formed of similar opposing shapes on the horizontal axis. The intersection of these areas is a murky and deliberately ill-defined source of the river while the snow-covered peaks in the distance and actual origin of the water rise above. At the center of the action is a cascading torrent of water composed of swirling and broken brushwork. This highly energetic treatment of the paint is carried over to the plants and the
broken branch in the lower right quadrant.

The sunlight in Kings River plays a dramatic role in the painting. Keith
effectively divides the picture with a diagonal line from the upper right to lower left corner. Everything above the line is in sunlight and everything below in darkness. This is surely reminiscent of a number of Bierstadt's compositions. Keith has the sunlight strike the dominant tree on the right side of the composition halfway up the trunk. This tree shows the easy mastery Keith achieved in capturing these massive, majestic and mute observers of the wilds. With an economy of brushstrokes, Keith gives the tree's twists and turns depth and three dimensional form using layers of umber over deep green and brown. This ability to capture apparently exquisite detail (which on closer inspection is revealed to be masses of quick overlaid brushwork) was achieved with much practice. Keith wrote to a friend in 1870, admiring just this approach in the work of German landscape painter Andreas Achenbach: "Oh the stupendous force and skill no niggling finish here, look close and it's a mass of unmeaning paint." ² Kings River demonstrates the brilliance of an artist able to take in different movements and techniques and meld them into a powerful vision of this revered landscape.

¹ A. Harrison, The Comprehensive Keith: The Hundred Year History of the Saint Mary's College Collection of Works by William Keith, St. Mary's College, 2011, p. 29.
² Ibid., p. 23.