Lot 2
William Keith(1838-1911)A view of Reverend Joseph Worcester's House, Piedmont, California 16 3/8 x 27 14in overall: 26 1/2 x 37 1/4in
7 August 2018, 18:00 PDT
Los Angeles and San FranciscoUS$15,000 - US$20,000
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Aaron Bastian
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Kathy Wong
Director, US Business Development, Fine Art
William Keith (1838-1911)
A view of Reverend Joseph Worcester's House, Piedmont, California
unsigned
oil on canvas
16 3/8 x 27 14in
overall: 26 1/2 x 37 1/4in
Painted circa 1883
unsigned
oil on canvas
16 3/8 x 27 14in
overall: 26 1/2 x 37 1/4in
Painted circa 1883
Footnotes
Provenance
Private collection, California.
The present work depicts an idyllic pastoral view of the Piedmont Hills with a sweeping panorama of the San Francisco Bay and Marin County beyond. Notably pictured in the midground is a cottage which the Reverend Joseph Worcester designed for himself in 1876.
Rev. Worcester was a Swedenborgian minister whose spiritual beliefs were compatible with the Transcendentalist philosophy of his day. Keith was sympathetic to his beliefs, and became a close friend in the late 1870s. According to Scott A. Shields, Keith visited Rev. Worcester at his Piedmont home as well as his church in San Francisco and included the home in more than one landscape painting of the Piedmont hills.1
The Rev. Worcester cottage was as architecturally significant then as it is today. Rev. Worcester's interest in architecture was a natural extension of his spiritual views on the harmony of God in nature. He is credited with developing a California version of the Shingle Style architecture, known today as the First Bay Tradition, which counted architects Bernard Maybeck, Julia Morgan, and John Galen Howard as its best-known adherents.
In keeping with the philosophy of the Shingle Style, the emphasis was on harmony with nature through the use of humble materials and guild craftsmanship. Evident in the present work is the natural redwood façade, which was both abundant, inexpensive, and helped to blend the architectural mass into the landscape.
The work relates to two known oil paintings of the same subject, both of a similar size and dated 1883, in private collections.
1 Scott A. Shields, Artists at Continent's End: The Monterey Peninsula Art Colony, 1875 - 1907, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2006, p. 44.