279 Glacier Meadow in the High Sierra

Category Art
Auction Currency USD
Start Price 40,000.00 USD
Estimated at 80,000.00 - 120,000.00 USD
Glacier Meadow in the High Sierra
Artist: Keith, WilliamDate of Birth: 1838-1911
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 24 x 31 1/2 inches
Signed: Signed lower left and dated 1880
Verso:

Scottish born William Keith began his career as an engraver in New York. He settled in San Francisco in 1862, began to study painting, and took up the brush full time in 1868 after receiving a number of commissions. His early work was influenced by his friendship with eminent naturalist John Muir, who encouraged him to strive for accuracy in representing nature, but by the early 1880’s, after a sojourn in Munich learning the art of portrait painting, Keith pursued the softness of Barbizon and Impressionist approaches. At the same time, Keith, having lost his first wife, sought solace in the teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg, whose emphasis on dreams and visions as avenues to faith attracted the artist. By 1891, after he had met and been inspired by George Inness, Keith’s paintings become more subjective and spiritual, reactions to rather than representations of nature. Some three thousand of his works were lost in the earthquake of 1906.
1886, the year Keith painted Glacier Meadow in the High Sierra, marks a high point in the artist’s career. Keith had returned from Europe, had remarried, and had built a new home in Berkeley and an impressive studio in San Francisco. As Alfred Harrison writes in The Comprehensive Keith: “It is a mistake to think that from 1886 on, Keith was a painter only of portraits and moody landscapes of oak trees and cattle in a subjective style... Keith continued to do topographical landscapes, though in a broader style than before his trip to Munich. One of these, titled Glacier Meadow in the High Sierra, included an extensive camp of Indians in the foreground.” (Harrison, p. 59.) The Native Americans depicted here, Mono (Paiute) or Miwok (which rhymes with Ewok, which is where George Lucas apparently derived the name for the fierce and funny people in Return of the Jedi) may well be engaged in acorn or pinon nut gathering or some other ceremony as the structures look very much like granaries and sweat houses. Though Keith painted many beautiful landscapes, the number a variety of figures in Glacier Meadow in the High Sierra is unusual, if not unprecedented, and greatly adds to the work’s pictorial and historical interest.