19th century AD

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 2001 by Alfred C. Harrison Jr.

In October 1869 and again in the summer of 1870 Key traveled to Lake Tahoe, where he made sketches that he used as the basis for larger paintings during the remainder of his career His Lake Tahoe 1873 (Pl. VIII), painted in his Boston studio from a sketch made in October 1869, shows the view from Tahoe City on the northwest side of the lake looking east to the Nevada side. The season is late autumn. An early winter storm has passed, leaving a dusting of snow on the high peaks and clearing the atmosphere of all impurities. Key has chosen to emphasize the deep blue of the lake, which is its most celebrated feature. The intensity of the cool lake and sky tones is emphasized by their juxtaposition to the warm earth tints and autumn foliage. The orange of the bushes is the complementary color to the blue of the water since there is no blue in orange (a blend of red and yellow). For this reason, blue and orange contrast vividly when laid side by side. In true luminist fashion the artist has kept the horizon below t he midpoint of the painting, emphasizing the sky and its reflection in the water rather than the alpine grandeur that such a subject could easily evoke in a landscape painter.

The same restraint is present in Key's beautiful Lake Tahoe 1871 (P1. X), painted in Baltimore shortly after the artist left California. It has the same panoramic horizontal format as the later painting--the format often preferred by such East Coast luminists as Martin Johnson Heade (1819-1904)--and it has the low horizon and sunset tones of Heade's Lake George of 1862 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). The human presence is reduced to a tiny Wordsworthian figure reclining in the meadow at the right, staring out at the view. The white sails of the two boats pull the viewer's eye into the distance and add a pleasing and irregular dash of white to the cloud reflections. The framing tree at the right, a Jeffrey pine of the Sierra Nevada, extends a branch toward the beautiful scene in a "lo and behold" gesture. The dark pine-clad point of land in the middle ground serves as a similar guidepost, directing the eye toward the reflection of the heavenly light in the still water. A rotting stump in the right foreground is a reminder that earthly life is transitory. The theme of the painting is clear: Follow the visual pointers and look away from the earth to the transcendental beauty of the light

Another eastern painter who set up a studio in San Francisco in 1869 was Gilbert Munger; Key's childhood friend from the District of Columbia. At the age of fifteen Munger was hired by the Smithsonian Institution to make engravings from botanical and zoological field studies. Key and Munger served on opposite sides during the Civil War, but resumed their friendship immediately afterwards, and their artistic careers followed similar paths.

In the summer of 1869 Munger was hired by the geologist Clarence King (1842-1901) to be an expedition artist on the United States fortieth parallel survey, and he spent much of the summer in the Wasatch Mountains of the Utah region. From there Munger traveled on his own to San Francisco, where he worked up his field studies into finished paintings. In March 1870 he exhibited a painting entitled A View in the Wahsatch [sic] Valley that the art critic of the San Francisco Chronicle described as "one of the best pictures that has ever been produced in California... The snowy peaks in the distance... are painted in a most masterly and effective manner, while the atmospheric effects are simply admirable." [5] This painting is unlocated, but Munger's large painting of 1877 entitled The Wasatch Mountains with Salt Lake City and the Great Salt Lake in the Foregroud (P1.XI) demonstrates the painter's mastery of "atmospheric effects." Just as Key depicted the Sierra Nevada range in his painting of Lake Tahoe, Munger ha s elogated and flattened the Wasatch range, creating a mood of tranquility with an extensive foreground of still water and a huge sky. The twilight creates a seamless harmony of related tones so intense that the viewer senses a divine presence behind the visual world.