Stinson Beach, oil on board, late 1870s or early 1880s
In 1908, Brother Fidelis Cornelius Braeg, a Swiss-born art professor and mountain climber who later joined the faculty at St. Mary's College in Moraga, called on John Muir at the great naturalist's Martinez home. That's where he first saw the majestic Sierra panoramas and pastoral Bay Area landscapes of Muir's close friend William Keith, the celebrated California painter whose spiritually imbued pictures thrilled him.
"I found them nearest to expressing the quality, mystery and wonder of any paintings I had ever scene," wrote Brother Cornelius, who began collecting the paintings that form the core of St. Mary's peerless Keith collection, and would write the definitive biography of the prolific Scottish-born artist who helped found the Sierra Club.
More than 80 of the paintings Brother Cornelius acquired are on view in "The Comprehensive Keith: A Centennial Tribute," a rich retrospective at the recently expanded St. Mary's College Museum of Art, formerly called the Hearst Art Gallery. It features 106 paintings by the masterly colorist whose precisely rendered landscapes of the late 1860s and '70s - which were encouraged by Muir and influenced by the dramatic Hudson River School painter Albert Bierstadt - gave way to moodier, subjective and more abstract images that reflect Keith's love of French Barbizon painting and his embrace of the spiritual teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg.
"Keith came to the conclusion that no artist could ever re-create what a Supreme Being had made, so the artist should try to suggest how nature made him or her feel," says Heidi Donner, St. Mary's resident Keith expert. The museum's education and publicity manager, she organized this show, which was designed and installed by museum Director Carrie Brewster.
Over the years, Keith's poetic landscapes - many painted in his San Francisco studio from sketches he made in the Sierra, around the Bay Area, in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska - have been displayed in small thematic shows in the Keith Room of the Spanish-style gallery, which was built in 1977 with funding from the Hearst Foundation. The current retrospective
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/11/09/DD711LQRPV.DTL#ixzz1dQ7WGnt6
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