William Keith
The Scottish-born William Keith moved to San Francisco in 1859 and developed a lifelong passion for the California landscape. He found success painting landscapes for the Northern Pacific Railroad, and these commissions financed travel to Europe to further his art education. On a return trip to San Francisco, Keith befriended the naturalist John Muir. Their remarkable friendship has been called “one of the important cultural transactions of the period in California.”
What makes a landscape memorable?
Mountain scenery was a subject popular with both European and American artists. Keith here depicted Mount Tamalpais, in Marin County, north of San Francisco. When this painting was exhibited in New York, a reviewer for a San Francisco newspaper favorably described the landscape as demonstrating “entire unpretentiousness, freedom from affectation and from strange and startling effects.”
Museum collection, gift of Mrs. Joseph O. Tobin
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