Note
William Keith
(b. 1838, Scotland – d. 1911, Berkeley, CA)
MOUNT SHASTA AND SPIRIT LAKE
1874, Oil on canvas, 72 x 120 inches
Jonathan Club collection
William Keith was born in Scotland and began his career as a commercial artist in New York. In 1859 he ventured to San Francisco where he eventually shifted to easel painting. In the mid-nineteenth century four main subjects were popular among America's growing middle class: portraits, still lifes, genre scenes, and landscapes. San Francisco had a budding art scene and abundant raw material in the Sierra Nevada to satisfy any Romantic Realist.
Keith's friendship with naturalist John Muir, their extended hiking trips through the Sierras, as well as Keith's belief in nature being a physical representation of God resulted in the artist's creation of heroic panoramas of these majestic mountains.
One of the quintessential subjects for nineteenth century Northern California artists was Mount Shasta. Located about 275 miles north of San Francisco, the solitary, inactive volcanic cone in the Cascade Range rises 14,000 feet. Piercing the sky, mountains have always been regarded as abode of the gods, their rising slopes inspirational, and their dominance over the landscape imposing. Works such as this one were too large to be painted on site and so were typically assembled in the studio. Much of the detail in the foreground is creative and meant to emphasize the romantic wildness of nature: the fallen trees, rushing rivulets, the massive boulders, and the twisted redwoods.