William Keith was a Scottish-American painter famous for his California landscapes. He is associated with Tonalism and the American Barbizon school. Although most of his career was spent in California, he started out in New York, made two extended study trips to Europe, and had a studio in Boston in 1871-72 and one in New York in 1880.
Keith was born in Oldmeldrum, Aberdeenshire, Scotland, where he was raised at first by his grandparents, his father having died months before he was born. William claimed to have been a direct descendant of the noble Clan Keith. He emigrated with his mother and sisters to the United States in 1850. They settled in New York City, where he attended school for several years and became an apprentice wood engraver in 1856. He was hired to do illustrations for Harper's Magazine. In 1858 he visited Scotland and England and briefly worked for the London Daily News. He was then offered an opportunity in San Francisco and sailed there in May 1859.
William Keith, from 1913 Exhibition booklet, Art Institute of Chicago
Upon Keith's arrival in San Francisco the job he had hoped for did not materialize, so he set up his own engraving business. He formed a partnership with Harrison Eastman in 1862 and with Durbin Van Vleck in 1864. He first studied painting with Samuel Marsden Brookes in 1863, and may have taken watercolor instruction from Elizabeth Emerson, whom he married in 1864. He first exhibited his watercolors in 1866, and they were praised by critics. His subject matter already included views of Yosemite and other High Sierra locations. By 1868 he had begun painting in oils. That year Keith was able to end his engraving career and pursue painting full-time when he received a commission from the Oregon Navigation and Railroad Company to paint scenes of the Pacific Northwest.
The Keiths went to Düsseldorf, Germany, in 1869-71, following in the footsteps of American artists such as Albert Bierstadt and Worthington Whittredge. While there, Keith studied under Albert Flamm, but also wrote enthusiastically in letters about the free, "suggestive" brushwork of Andreas Achenbach. He also spent time in Paris, where he admired both the old masters and the Barbizon school painters. Upon his return to the United States, he shared a studio in Boston with William Hahn from 1871 to 1872.
Keith then returned to California, and traveled to Yosemite Valley with a letter of introduction to John Muir. The two men became deep friends for the next 38 years. Both had been born in Scotland the same year, and they shared a love for the mountains of California. James Mitchell Clarke described their friendship as one "in which deep affection and admiration were expressed through a kind of verbal boxing, counter-jibe answering jibe, counter-insult responding to insult."
During the 1870s Keith painted a number of six- by ten-foot panoramas, including Kings River Canyon (Oakland Museum, originally owned by Gov. Leland Stanford) and "California Alps" (Mission Inn, Riverside). These competed with paintings of similar size and subject matter by Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Hill.
Keith's wife Elizabeth died in 1882. He turned for comfort to a friend, the Swedenborgian minister Joseph Worcester, who ultimately had a strong influence on Keith's approach to landscape painting.
In 1883 Keith married Mary McHenry, who was the first female graduate of Hastings Law School and a leading suffragette. For their honeymoon, they went on a painting tour of the old California missions. A few months later they traveled to the East Coast and then to Munich, where Keith was determined to learn figure and portrait painting. He primarily worked on his own, occasionally receiving criticism from artists including Carl von Marr and J. Frank Currier. They returned to San Francisco in mid 1885.
Through Joseph Worcester, Keith met the architect Daniel Burnham in Chicago while en route to Europe. Burnham became an important patron and agent, showing and selling Keith paintings to collectors in the Chicago area.
In 1886 the Keiths moved into a custom-built house in Berkeley, from where he would commute to his studio in San Francisco each day. That year Keith also cruised Alaska's Inland Passage and sketched some of its glaciers.
Keith painted some portraits on commission and also supplemented his income by giving painting lessons, mostly to women. Among his pupils was the miniaturist Rosa Hooper.
In 1888 Keith traveled north with Muir, visiting Mount Shasta and Mount Rainier to create illustrations for Muir's Picturesque California. Muir encouraged Keith to depict mountain scenery realistically, but as Keith's artistic sense had matured, he felt free to depart from geologic reality, placing an imagined glacier or a river in a scene to enhance the beauty of the painting. The two friends argued frequently about such artistic issues. It was said that Muir said, “You never saw a sunrise like that, Keith. Why in the deuce don’t you imitate nature?’ William would goad Muir by responding, ‘Look here now, John, if you’ll go out early tomorrow morning and look toward the East you’ll see nature imitating my sunrise.".

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