Landscape (Primary Title)
William Keith, American, born Scotland, 1838 - 1911 (Artist)
After immigrating to California from Scotland in 1859, William Keith found a lifelong subject in the mountains, rivers, and meadows of the Sierra Nevada. Landscape features a worn path and running stream that lead the viewer’s eye back to a Native American encampment, where red highlights stand out against a forested curtain before the great rise of a mountain range. John Muir, the prominent environmentalist and close friend of the artist, encouraged Keith to create highly naturalistic landscapes with tightly rendered forms. Yet by the late 1880s he favored a looser brushstroke as seen in Landscape. Keith suggests an Edenic paradise in this untouched wilderness, a common theme for both the artist and Muir, who would later establish the Sierra Club, one of the nation’s earliest conservationist organizations.
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