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KEITH AND MUIR
Keith arrived at Muir’s cabin in Yosemite Valley with a letter of introduction in 1872, and a lifelong friendship quickly developed. The two Scottish immigrants took camping trips together in the High Sierra, saw each other when Muir was in San Francisco and helped inspire each other’s work. The idea for the Sierra Club was first formed in Keith’s studio during conversations with Muir, Dr. Joseph LeConte, the first president of the University of California, and Warren Olney, a prominent San Francisco attorney.
Muir’s concern with scientific accuracy reinforced Keith’s early training as a wood engraver in encouraging him to reproduce the exact topography and details of a landscape early in his career. Keith had also already expressed a preference by 1870 to “study altogether from Nature,” reflecting in part the admonishments of the influential writer John Ruskin.
KEITH’S ARTISTIC TRANSITIONS
Although there was a general trend in Keith’s work from tightly worked detail and bright sunlight to broader brushwork and twilight scenes, his path was not a simple, straightforward one. It seems to have reflected a waxing and waning of various influences, including his personal predilections and moods, art market forces, an interest in the “old masters” (especially Rembrandt), and allegiances to friends of different persuasions about art.
Two lengthy sojourns in Europe, each bracketed by visits to the eastern United States, had particularly strong effects on Keith’s artistic development. In 1869, three years after he first began exhibiting and selling paintings, he left San Francisco for visits to New York and Paris and art study in Dusseldorf, Germany. By the time he returned to San Francisco in 1872, his painting style had changed considerably. The abundance of foreground detail typical of early works like San Anselmo Valley Near San Rafael had been replaced by looser, sketchier brushstrokes as in Mount Lyell, California Sierra. While remaining convinced of John Ruskin’s teaching that art must be a faithful rendering of nature, Keith had become enthusiastic about a more “suggestive” approach to capturing the natural world on canvas. His European experience had consisted more of looking at art, talking with artists, and painting on his own rather than of formal art education. He did not enroll in the Dusseldorf Academy, and he seems to have been influenced more by French Barbizon art than by the traditions associated with Dusseldorf, where Albert Bierstadt, Worthington Whittredge, and Sanford Gifford had studied earlier. The popularity of “modern” French painting in Boston, where Keith spent several months in 1871-72, may have reinforced this direction.
Keith’s second trip to Europe centered around a stay in Munich in 1883-85. There he again engaged mostly in a diligent self-directed study, focusing on portraiture. Polemics is an example of the portraits he painted in Munich. He later was commissioned to paint portraits of various prominent Californians, but his mainstay continued to be landscape.
Probably through the influence of various German and American landscapists working around Munich (who in turn were admirers of French Barbizon art), Keith’s landscapes after 1885 generally became even looser in brushwork as well as moodier in effect. He also painted some watercolors, such as Gray Rain Cloud, Cattle in Meadow, in his post-Munich years, returning to the medium in which he first had begun painting before he took up oils.
In the 1870s, Keith had established his reputation as a painter of grand panoramic landscapes, often of the High Sierra or other mountainous countries, and sometimes as large as six by ten feet. This type of painting could serve both as a document of a specific locale and as an homage to divine creation in the form of the impressive American wilderness. By the 1890s, Keith typically painted forest glades at sunset, with other kinds of religious overtones. Evening Glow is a rather dramatic example. Like the Eastern painter George Inness, Keith became an adherent to Swedenborgianism. He believed that his late, dark, indistinct works better suggested the spiritual reality that lay beyond the surface forms of nature.
Although he was best known in California, Keith’s achievements were noted in East Coast newspapers as early as 1872. Keith had a studio in Boston for several months, and as late as April 1911, when New York art dealer William Macbeth published “Memories of William Keith” in the Christian Science Monitor.
A prominent New York art collector, architect Charles F. McKim, met Keith in 1905. According to the San Francisco Wasp, he said,
“My visit to the studio of this San Francisco artist furnished me the surprise of my life. I had heard of Keith, of course, and knew that he did good work, but I was wholly unprepared for what I saw. As I glanced around the studio, I was amazed and puzzled, for I observed pictures that at the first cursory glance suggested Daubigny and Corot and Millet and others acknowledged great masters of the poetic moods in landscape painting. But none of the pictures were in the slightest degree copies of those famous artists. A new master had arisen who could touch all the keys with which they were so familiar and use them in his own way to impress his individuality on his work. And such perfect and admirable work! Well, I bought $15,000 worth of it in ten minutes.”
The great naturalist John Muir called William Keith a “poet-painter,” referring to the lyrical quality in Keith’s art. As with his contemporaries George Inness, Winslow Homer, and Albert Pinkham Ryder, Keith’s style gradually evolved from accurate descriptions of specific places to the use of landscape elements to express and evoke feelings. His love of nature was a common thread throughout his painting career, and one of several bonds between him and John Muir, the founder of the Sierra Club and “father” of the National Parks system.
KEITH’S FIRST BIOGRAPHER, BROTHER CORNELIUS, F.S.C.
It was the spiritual qualities of Keith’s works, an appreciation for his artistic and scholarly rigor, and a shared love of California’s mountains, that led Brother Fidelis Cornelius Braeg, F.S.C., of Saint Mary’s College, to make Keith the subject of much of his life’s work. The Christian Brother and art professor first encountered Keith’s paintings during a 1908 visit with Muir in his Martinez home. Brother Cornelius, who was also an artist and an avid mountaineer, interviewed scores of Keith’s friends, relatives, and fellow artists, read period newspaper accounts, and traveled to Keith’s favorite scenic spots throughout the West. He later wrote a 900-page biography of Keith, collected more than 100 of Keith’s paintings and gave them to the College, and organized several Keith exhibitions. His legacy lives on in the ongoing research and publications and conservation of the artworks.
The William Keith Collection is currently not on view. Please refer to exhibitions to plan your visit to view works at the museum.
Our conception of nature has been dramatically altered in the last century
Only one-and-a-half centuries have passed between the two pieces – a blink of an eye for a species like ours and even less so for the planetary cryosphere – but the relationship between humanity and ice is radically different. In Church’s time, the greenhouse effect had barely been suggested by scientists such as Eunice Newton Foote and John Tyndall, who coincidentally attended the painting’s preview party in London. In 2020, we are certain we are literally melting the planet’s ice.
In Ice Watch by Olafur Eliasson, ice is a metaphor for the damage humans have inflicted on the Earth (Credit: Olafur Eliasson/Minik Rosing)
As scientists, policy-makers and members of the public attempt to make sense of the climate crisis, art historians poring over artworks are finding all sorts of answers (and a handful of new questions) about how our relationship with nature has changed, about past and present societies’ ideas of climate and even about the physical changes of our planet.
A changing relationship
One of the central conclusions art historians have made is that our conception of nature has been dramatically altered in the last century. If you visited the Princeton Art Museum for its 2018 exhibition Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment, you might have caught glimpses of this transition (albeit one that’s messy, non-linear and far from finished) from immutable to frail nature.
The exhibition, co-curated by Kusserow, followed a journey of more than three centuries of American art. Nature’s Nation ranged from works such as the panoramic Bridal Veil Falls, Yosemite by Albert Bierstadt, a celebration of nature’s power in the US during the 1870s, to its 21st-Century reponse, Valerie Hegarty’s Fallen Bierstadt, which portrays a very similar monumental landscape in decay, as if consumed by time or fire.
Yosemite by Albert Bierstadt, is a celebration of nature’s power in the 1870s, and was part of a 2018 exhibition Nature’s Nation (Credit: The North Carolina Museum of Art)
“There’s a 180-degree switch from a world that we have no control over, to one in which we are actually controlling the fate of the planet, and recognising that we’re not doing a very good job on it,” says Kusserow.
He argues that a noticeable transition, at least in the US, occurred during the 1960s, propelled by the counterculture movement and books such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring – whose first chapter is also a speculative fiction short story. The following decades saw artists producing work that was self-conscious about environmental issues and moved beyond romantic representations of the natural world.
One of those pieces is Ocean Landmark, a concept-defying installation by Betty Beaumont, built between 1978 and 1980. It falls into the relatively compact field of ‘land art’, which is made directly in the landscape, sculpting the land itself.
Partly sponsored by the US Department of Energy and the Smithsonian Institution, Beaumont took 17,000 neutralised coal fly-ash blocks and dumped them 3 miles (5km) from the coast of New York. The coal reached 70ft (21.3m) deep and rested on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, where it became a hybrid between sculpture and artificial reef. Yet its remoteness and the decision to create art for nature also says something about its time.
Ocean Landmark, built by Betty Beaumont between 1978-1980, is a more self-consciously environmental approach to landscape art (Credit: Betty Beaumont)
“The reason why I like this piece is that it’s something you can’t access. Because it’s underwater, it’s always going to be elsewhere. It shows we can connect with the environment, but without claiming it as our own,” says Francesca Curtis, who’ll be presenting a paper on this piece at a conference on art history and climate change organised by the Courtauld Institute of Art in mid-2020. “The ocean space is there, and it exists, but it’s not for us.”
Ocean Landmark also challenges the concept of nature as something opposed or at least different to culture. The artwork is the reef, which is now considered a fish haven by the US government. “You can’t separate the idea of the environment from all the political problems that exist today, precisely because of things like climate change,” says Curtis, a PhD student at the University of York’s History of Art department.
The tip of the iceberg?
As the 20th Century presented graver and graver environmental challenges, and the anxieties around waste management, nuclear energy and air, water and chemical pollution became multiplied, that boundary between nature and culture blurred.
Half the world away from Ocean Landmark, a cadre of Indian artists have been reflecting and producing work about one of those meeting points between the natural and the human: farmers’ suicides. Art historian and educator Preeti Kathuria has been following this field’s development since the early 2000s, including the work of artists such as Kota Neelima, the collective The Gram Art Project and the duo Thukral and Tagra, and will also present her work at the Courtauld’s conference.
Indian duo Thukral and Tagra have been creating climate change works for six years, including a series of flying houses, Dominus Aeiris (Credit: Thukral and Tagra Studio)
She has noticed the transition even in the last couple of decades. As the impacts of climate change become more striking, so have artists’ approaches. Kathuria suggests air pollution as an example in which changes in the city are forcing artists to react. “Suddenly, we cannot survive without air purifiers,” she says. “We never needed air purifiers in Delhi. The problem is now coming face-to-face, so naturally the response of the artist has become much more direct.”
Scientists and artists have also studied artworks to aid them in their reconstruction of past weather and climatic conditions. This is partly because of a “climate consciousness” that modern viewers have, says the art historian Theo Gordon, a postdoctoral fellow at The Courtauld Institute and the organiser of its upcoming conference.
Do we limit ourselves to an artist’s contemporary intent or do we try to see other things in the work of art?
“The way we are thinking about the climate now in increasingly alarmed terms is historically specific,” says Gordon, referring to the way people in 2020 interpret climate-related information, including art. That is, Church’s contemporaries in 1860 would not have represented the idea of ‘climate’ with the same emotional baggage as we do, which in turn prompts new questions about how to view these pieces. Do we limit ourselves to an artist’s contemporary intent or do we try to see other things in the work of art? Is an iceberg just an iceberg, or is it a metaphor for how a society sees ice?
Some fields provide straightforward answers. Paintings and sketches allowed researchers in Switzerland to understand how the Lower Grindelwald Glacier, located in the Alps, behaved after 1600 and before photography was invented. The researchers happily agreed in an academic paper published in 2018 that “with a huge number of high-quality pictorial documents, it is possible to reconstruct the (Little Ice Age) history of many glaciers in the European Alps from the 17th to the 19th Centuries.”
Paintings such as this one from 1774 allowed researchers to understand how the Lower Grindelwald Glacier behaved before photography was invented (Credit: Alamy)
Simply put, if you compare the past extent of glaciers in older paintings with current observations, you can tell how long a glacier was before we started warming up the planet. In turn, that can provide answers for how quickly we might lose ice in the future.
In a similar fashion, scholars from Greece and other countries suggested in a 2014 study that the colours of sunsets painted by famous artists can be used to estimate pollution levels in the Earth’s atmosphere for the past five centuries.
“Nature speaks to the hearts and souls of great artists,” said researcher Christos Zerefos, professor of Atmospheric Physics at the Academy of Athens in Greece, when the research was published. “But we have found that, when colouring sunsets, it is the way their brains perceive greens and reds that contains important environmental information.”
A 2014 study suggested that paintings including JMW Turner’s The Scarlet Sunset could be used to estimate pollution levels for the past five centuries (Credit: Alamy)
If you go further back, as the German historian Wolfgang Behringer does in his book A Cultural History of Climate, you would notice that prior to the 1500s there are very few occurrences of snowy landscapes in Western European art. Behringer suggests that the lower-than-usual temperatures during the so-called Little Ice Age plunged European artists like Pieter Bruegel the Elder into a new branch of landscape painting: the winter landscape.
This subgenre includes works such as Bruegel’s The Hunters in the Snow, a 1565 oil-on-wood detailed depiction of an idyllic winter scene. But beyond the snow, it’s the little details that reveal the cultural and social dimensions of how people were living with the idea of changes in their climate.
Art offers a window into our past, present and future climate that science alone can never offer
“The hunters have all these dogs behind them,” says George Adamson, a historian and geographer at King’s College London, who believes that artworks help us understand how past societies dealt with meteorological events. “I count 12 or 13 dogs with them, so it’s obvious they’ve got out for a big hunt, but they have one fox on their back.”
Those winter landscapes left a bleak impression in the 1500s, he says. But take a look at the next time temperatures slightly dropped in Western Europe, after the 1700s, and you’ll see a different perception of a blanketed field. “When you see snow scenes again in the 19th Century, they tend not to show quite so much hardship. In fact, you get the more romanticised view of the countryside”.
It has been suggested that the 1500s Little Ice Age inspired artists to paint winter landscapes, such as Bruegel’s The Hunters in the Snow (Credit: Kunsthistorisches Museum)
Adamson makes a crucial, nuanced point: the elements we see in a painting don’t make up a climate on their own. These are meteorological conditions, pictures of weather and a time and place. It’s rather the cultural ways in which humans live in those climates, and their representations of them in art, that we should be observing.
For instance, the best representation of our current emergency is not in temperature charts or in the upwards concentration of carbon in the atmosphere. The climate crisis, and what it means to us in 2020, is better explained with youth strikers’ signs, the debris left behind after a cyclone and the sketches over wildfire emergency maps. To fully understand a climate, even in a painting, we need the cultural artefacts; one must observe the shoes and the dogs.
“Those elements can probably tell you more about climate than a thermometer does,” says Adamson. Art offers a window into our past, present and future climate that science alone can never offer, precisely because it reflects our frustrations, hopes and anxieties about nature. It helps understand something an iceberg survey alone will never accomplish: whether ice is a victim or a villain.
Diego Arguedas Ortiz is a science and climate change reporter. He is @arguedasortiz on Twitter.
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