WILLIAM KEITH 1838-1911

Oil on canvas, 56 x 60" (91.44 x 152.40 cm.)

In reviewing the Spring Exhibition of the San Francisco Art Association in April of 1878, the critic of the San Francisco News Letter and California Advertiser took notice of Keith's painting An Autumnal Sunset on the Russian River, calling it "something of a new departure for Keith, who usually delights in cool greens, with but a slight tinge of color." The critic continued, "But this picture is red-hot-to speak plainly, he gives us the glowing atmosphere which lingers but a few minutes in this climate of short twilights. The effect of the coming darkness, as it spreads suddenly over the glowing sunset, is admirably done."' It is likely that the Butler Institute's Keith is the painting reviewed in the News Letter and is also the "just finished" Russian River painting in Keith's studio described in the San Francisco Chronicle of July 19, 1877: "The point of view is an elevation from which is seen the valley with a portion of the river and beyond a range of higher hills and a sunset with clouds of that rich gold seldom seen in other regions. The whole canvas is suffused with warmth and color, and is as dreamy as a still Indian summer afternoon." Keith may have kept retouching this work, a frequent practice of his, until 1878, when he signed it, dated it, and sent it off for exhibition.
William Keith launched into a career as a landscape painter in 1866 after having practiced the trade of wood engraving in his youth. His early paintings depict mountain subjects bathed in pastel tones borrowed from the style of his friend and mentor Charles C. Nahl. Between 1869 and 1871 Keith spent a year and a half in Europe, living in Dusseldorf, but absorbing the influence of the French Barbizon paintings he saw during an extended visit to Paris. A season in Boston reinforced his admiration for Barbizon technique. When he returned to San Francisco in 1872, he emulated Thomas Hill and Albert Bierstadt in producing huge mountain panoramas, while executing smaller-scale landscapes in the looser French style.
Towards the end of the 1870s, Keith started to experiment with more spiritually- charged landscapes that took the darker, more impressionistic Barbizon aesthetic to its extreme. An Autumnal Sunset on the Russian River is one of his earliest and largest works in this mode. Although this particular landscape was praised when first exhibited, other paintings in the same style done the following year were criticized. "It is a great mistake in Mr. Keith," wrote the critic of the daily newspaper Alta California, "to suppose that the public taste will be satisfied with landscapes in which there is a yellow sunset, with distant mountains, middle ground and foreground so vaguely painted that nothing can be seen distinctly save the sky." The San Francisco Chronicle critic attempted to explain Keith's new manner: "He is searching for Rembrandt effects, or something akin to the startling contrasts which made that artist, who saw nature in a few simple and strong moods, so greatly impressive." Keith seems to have been responding to a visionary inspiration in paintings of this sort. In describing a sunset scene in 1879, the Chronicle reporter noted a "sky ... rich with green, gold and crimson . . . the sunset, presumed to represent to the imagination the end of life and the glories to come after." This visionary style would become Keith's chief inspiration in his later career under the influence of the Swedenborgian minister, the Reverend Joseph Worcester. An Autumnal Sunset on the Russian River demonstrates that it was already part of the artist's repertoire during the 1870s.

ALFRED C. HARRISON, JR.