RECOLLECTIONS OF JOHN MUIR 

 By Charles Keeler 



My earliest recollections of John Muir date back some twen- 

 ty-odd years, to those golden days in William Keith's rather 

 dingy but glorious studio on Montgomery Street, when Muir 

 would drop in from his Martinez retreat for a chat with his old 

 painter friend. The two Scotchmen, who had camped together 

 in Sierra wilds in summer outings, and cracked jokes at one 

 another's expense in the studio or at one of the little French 

 restaurants where they lunched during winter visits, were big 

 elemental natures, both of them. The child-heart each had trea- 

 sured in his own peculiar way. They were Willie and Johnnie 

 in their bantering sallies. 



Both were deeply religious natures, but emancipated from 

 formalism and tradition. Both were students and lovers of na- 

 ture, but where Keith saw color and atmosphere, poetry and 

 romance, in mountain and vale, tree and sky, Muir's eyes were 

 fixed on the ever-changing processes of immutable law. 



Those who knew Keith's work best realized that it fell into 

 two groups — a comparatively hard, literal portrayal of the facts 

 of landscape, and a free, impassioned outburst of impression- 

 istic depicting of nature's moods. In his own heart he scorned 

 the former and frankly gloried in the latter. His naturalistic 

 sketches in color were either studies of underlying fact or pot- 

 boilers for the uninitiated who were not up to his dream rhap- 

 sodies. 



Muir was at heart a seer. But for him the wonder and glory 

 of nature lay not in its romance of atmosphere and its appeal 

 to human emotions. He saw in it rather the embodiment of di- 

 vine law, and in a picture looked for a naturalistic portrayal 

 rather than an impressionistic interpretation. So it was that he 

 failed to appreciate his artist friend's finest work. With his dry 

 Scotch humor he loved to twit him in good-natured raillery. 

 Both in the old Montgomery Street studio, and later in the 

 larger Pine Street rooms, I have spent many a happy hour with 



