William Keith was a leading artist in San Francisco at the end of the nineteenth century. His combination of artistic genius, business acumen, strong personality and work ethic enabled him to build a prestigious reputation and financially successful career. Known as the 'Dean of the California Artists' his career spanned five decades in California.

Born in Aberdeen, Scotland in 1838, William Keith emigrated with his family to New York where, as a teenager, he was apprenticed to a wood engraver. He is believed to have come to San Francisco for two months in 1858 as an employee of Harper Brothers publishers. Following this assignment, he returned to Scotland and worked in England for the London Daily News. Upon his return to the United States, Keith settled in San Francisco and began work in the engraving shop of Harrison Eastman. He later established his own engraving business with Durbin Van Vleck at 611 Clay Street. Keith became interested in painting and first studied with Samuel Brookes in 1863. His first major commissions were to paint the landscape along the routes of the Northern Pacific and Oregon Railroad companies.

Two 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 was replaced by looser, sketchier brushstrokes. 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. 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. His friendship with John Muir, the famous naturalist, also introduced Keith to the most remote parts of Yosemite where Muir taught him the names of the trees and plants, and thoroughly acquainted him with nature's wonders.

Keith's second trip to Europe centered around a stay in Munich in 1883 to 1885. There he again engaged mostly in diligent self-directed study. 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.

William Keith's oeuvre can be divided into two periods: his early works are often mountain epics in descriptive realism as espoused by the Dusseldorf School; whereas, the paintings done during the last two decades of his life are more closely akin to those of the Barbizon painters. His later paintings are darker, smaller and more intimate with emphasis on mood. Keith commuted daily by ferry to his San Francisco studio and many of his later works are pastoral landscapes of Berkeley with oak trees, cows, and ponds which he sketched en route. He painted nearly 4,000 oil paintings of which 2,000 burned in the fire of 1906. Among the many honors accorded Keith include an entire room devoted to his work at the Pan-Pacific International Exposition of 1915; The Keith Gallery was opened in 1934 at St. Mary's College in Moraga; and in 1956 the William Keith Memorial Gallery opened at the Oakland Public Library. Streets in Oakland and Berkeley are named for him.