Benjamin West (206)

Benjamin West (10 October 1738–10 March 1820) was a painter and a member of the American Philosophical Society via his 1768 election to the American Society. It was in Springfield Township (in the portion now Swarthmore, PA) that West’s life—and by his lights, his childhood ascent to greatness—began. His parents were taverners and birthright (if unconvinced) Quakers, and Benjamin’s faith, too, appears nominal—but his early suffusion in the twined spiritualisms of both worlds bled into his later years. His origin story was among the barstool yarns he learned to spin early and spun often: Indians taught him how to use berries to make his first paints; he puckishly plucked his cat’s tail to make his first brush. Less in doubt: a gift for revealing the inner light of the portrait subjects who served as his stock and trade in his early years. Minimally schooled academically or artistically, West nevertheless found himself a patron in APS member William Smith, first provost of the College of Philadelphia, who worked to remediate West’s learning and inserted him into the circle of other young talents and would-be APS members Hopkinson, Duché, Godfrey, and Reed. At age twenty-two, West sailed for Italy with the young John Allen and Joseph Shippen to study the masters and “take a ramble,” and for three years Philadelphia patrons supported his studies. Artistic talent (quickly an honorary member of many Italian academies) and American affability (his exclamation on seeing the famed Apollo Belvedere—“how like it is to a young Mohawk warrior!”)—established him as the talk of the town. Consequently, West’s arrival in London in 1763 was preceded by his reputation. From there, his star’s ascent only hastened. Within a year, folks called him the American Raphael; his exhibited works, edging toward his fusion of realism and neo-romanticism, won wide praise. From the leading personages like Dr. Johnson and Mr. Burke to King George III himself, West won introductions. After completing The Departure of Regulus from Rome under the king’s commission, the royal named West the “Historical Painter to His Majesty” in 1772, paying a princely 1,000 guineas annually. But West continued to push boundaries despite being a pensioner: so radical indeed was the masterwork The Death of General Wolfe (1770), with its uniformed and loin-clothed subjects in their bittersweet moment of triumph over the French at the Battle of Quebec (1759) in the Seven Years’ War that the King refused to buy it. Yet it was but the first demonstration of the blurred lines of artifice and artistry that West now bent to his will to become a signature style. 

His home became a regular stop for Americans and Philadelphians, particularly. For example, despite living in Europe for his adult life, his continued contact with Benjamin Franklin led to Franklin’s standing as godfather to West’s second son. And West played a crucial role in mentoring APS member John Trumbull, whose works formed the image of the American Revolution in the popular mind, then and for posterity. (West, firmly at home in London, planned but wisely decided to forego a series of celebratory paintings.) Among his many honors was his 1792 election as president of the Royal Academy, a tricky administrative post saturated in politicking, made all the trickier by suspicions of his sympathies with the French Revolutionaries; his visitation of Napoleon in 1802 (and election to the Institut National) amplified those fears. Though the king suspended West’s royal appointment briefly in 1801, his personal charm and continued productivity kept him in the post through 1811. He remained highly sought and widely lauded. When the Managers of the Pennsylvania Hospital asked him to paint a work to adorn the first American hospital in 1800, the resultant Christ Healing the Sick in the Temple (1801) was so striking that West accepted a record 3,000 guineas from the British Institution who aspired to make it the centerpiece of a national gallery. He completed a copy for the Hospital in 1815, and visitation admissions raised over $25,000 for the hospital over nearly three decades. In all, West wrought more than 700 known works before his death in 1820. (PI, DNB, ANB)