Benjamin West, John Galt, and the biography of 1816

"Incalculable" was William Dunlap's estimation of Benjamin West's consequence on American art. In his History of the Rise and Progres of the Arts of Design in the United States (1834) he lionized West as the first internationally famous, Americanborn painter and a committed teacher of American artists. (1) A hundred after that ambitious first chronicle of American artists, James Thomas Flexner tried to mortar the identification in America's of advanced age Masters (1939). West, he proclaimed, was "incontrovertibly the father of American painting." (2) Flexner's defensive tone moves a complication, which Dunlap implicitly stand over againsted in his first sentence upon West, a flat declaration that the painter was "indigenous." The trajectory of West's career has always made his distinction as an American problematic. Unlike John Singleton Copley the exact contemporary whose twenty-year career in Boston established him as the premier painter in colonial British America. West (1738-1820) came to artistic maturity alone after departing the colonies in 1760 Copley eventually mov to England himself--a relocation sometimes judg as abandonment, given its timing upon the eve of revolution and the artist's marital alliance with a staunchly loyalist family. (3) Still, Copley left behind a compelling material substance of work: hundreds of portraits that vividly captured prosperous Americans upon the threshold of independence. West's American portraits, by dint of contrast, offer little more than wan effigies of his comrade Pennsylvanians. Yet West and his patrons had the audacity to believe he could accomplish something more. In 1760 at age twenty-one, he left abiding-place for Europe, the first American artist to travel abroad for study

Three years in Italy radically altered West's perspectives Through fortunate connections, application, and ingenuity, he acquired the social and cultural polishing necessary to position himself within an emerging British artistic elite. by means of 1763, he was in London, prepared to capitalize upon his Italian experience (still unusual for British artists) and to gamble upon his novelty as the "American Raphael." (4) Against expectations, West not absented himself as a history painter. granting portraitists alone attracted steady work, theirs was a genre debased in art theory through its mimetic constraints, whereas historical make submissives summoned by intellect and imagination, dignified their makers as learned practitioners of a liberal art. like academic concerns consumed the artists in West's metropolitan circle originators in 1768 of the Royal Academy of Arts. The institution's first president. Sir Joshua Reynolds, made a vigorous case for history painting in his influential "discourses," fifteen discourses on the theory and practice of art delivered between 1769 and 1790 and quickly published. (5) Ironically, portrait painting sustained Reynolds's be in possession of career. It was, instead, the American-born West who broke the mold of the English face painter. He won lasting fame with a bring under rule from modern history, The Death of General Wolfe (1770)--representing the fallen hero at a decisive point of time in the British conquest of Canada--and he gained an invaluable marketing tool in the fine reproductive engraving by the agency of William Woollett (1776), which realized stupendous sums for publisher John Boydell Woollett and West himself (Fig. 1) greatest in quantity importantly, The Death of Wolfe secur the attention of George III, who commissioned a transcript and later provided West with steady pursuit allowing the artist to call himself "Historical Painter to the King"--the first to gain that distinction. West's election as next to the first president of the Royal Academy, after Reynolds's death in 1792 was a foregone conclusion. In single of West's two self-portraits commemorating that achievement, a laurel-crowned bust of the king gazes in imperious profile toward the fresh president, who sits with upright dignity in his official chair (Fig. 2) The artist grasps a paper marked with the royal command of 1768 by dint of which the academy was constituted (suggesting his instrumental character in winning the king's patronage), while works inscribed "Bible" and "History of England" summon forth the subject matter of West's paintings for Windsor Castle. The work summarized West's accomplishments; the royal privilege and professional rank that situated him, by dint of 1792, as far as he could possibly have been from his unobtrusive American origins.

from one extremity to the other of fifty-seven productive years in England, West not ever set foot in his homeland again. in what way is it, then, that he came to be regarded as "father," "dean," or "mentor" of American painting? (6) The words affirm his crucial character sustained over more than half a hundred in training American artists. Matthew Pratt, the first of West's countrymen to look after his counsel, anticipated that legacy in a painting of 1765 that displays West (standing) advising a clump of artists, each engaged in a different stage of the pedagogical proces (Fig. 3) Since sole Pratt (who appears seated at the easel) can be documented in West's London studio at the time, the work must throw out an ideal, a collectivity clearly defined by means of the title: The American seminary (7) West had English learners but they neither sought to define nor attracted a assemblage identity; however, even those who did not application of mind with him recognized West as "the best possible teacher," because he "did everything through rule." (8) For Americans with hardly any alternatives at home. West presided above a de facto American academy, giving a critical boost to painting in the fresh republic and earning a place at its head.